Part of Series
Lucifer, a paranoid young man, believes that he is Satan and has a remarkable psychic ability to predict death by natural causes. Lucifer's ability is used by Seff's gang to extract ransom from their rich victims. Seff selects the victims and warns them of their impending death; any who do not pay the ransom seemingly dies from natural causes, helped on their way by Seff's executioner, Jack Wish. By what means are the victims being killed? How is the ransom money being collected without trace from under the sea? Modesty's friend, Steve Collier, the renowned psychic researcher, is kidnapped to help Seff but he accidentally blows Modesty's cover as she investigates this mystery. Taken prisoner, Modesty and her faithful lieutenant, Willie Garvin, must escape Seff's island stronghold in the third installment of Peter O'Donnell's best-selling Modesty Blaise series.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Peter O'Donnell also wrote as Madeleine Brent. http://www.cs.umu.se/~kenth/modesty.html is an excellent resource on this author. To help keep the novels and the adventure strip collections separate, here's some info about the Modesty Blaise works. In 1963, O'Donnell began his 38-year run as writer of the Modesty Blaise adventure story strip, which appeared six days a week in English and Scottish newspapers. He retired the strip in 2001. Each strip story took 18-20 weeks to complete. Several publishers over the years have attempted to collect these stories in large softcovers. Titan Publishing is currently in the process of bringing them all out in large-format softcover, with 2-3 stories in each books. These are called "graphic novels" in the Goodreads title. Meanwhile, during those 38 years, O'Donnell also wrote 13 books about Modesty Blaise: 11 novels and 2 short story/novella collections. These stories are not related to the strip stories; they are not novelizations of strip stories. They are entirely new, though the characters and "lives" are the same. These have been labeled "series #0". There is a large article on Peter O'Donnell on Wikipedia, with a complete bibliography.
