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Solange Peters 'died' - and so did the scandal and suspicion that haunted her. So now she has the chance for a new life . . . Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club. "You have been very fortunate," Solange Peter's lawyer told her when she was waiting to leave Rome under a suspicion of murder. "If there had been a prosecution you would have had nowhere to hide. As it is, you have a British passport, an air ticket to London that has been provided upon establishing your identity when you get there a sum of money will be made available to enable you to make your plans for a fresh start in any country except Italy." They had even booked a room for her, in short, every contingency had been covered except the one the most astute lawyer couldn't have foreseen. Into this contingency bursts Arthur Crook, as buoyant and enterprising as ever, to find himself once more involved in a complicated mystery whose by-product was murder. A bizarre accident gave Solange the chance to assume a new identity - and, as Julie Taylor, she set out to do just that, as companion to wealthy, neurotic Bianca Duncan. But soon she is plunged into a distorted and terrifying existence. A menace to Bianca's life is growing daily and a strange young man could expose Julie's masquerade. Suddenly the new identity seems far from safe. Tension and struggle mount until Julie is struggling for her life at the hands of a murderer. A most unusual and ingenious novel begins with a Gothic crime amid scenes of Italian splendor. It peruses its labyrinthine and exciting courses to a spell-binding climax beside the English sea. Mr. Gilbert is at his best here.
Author
Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Malleson an English crime writer. She also wrote non-genre fiction as Anne Meredith , under which name she also published one crime novel. She also wrote an autobiography under the Meredith name, Three-a-Penny (1940). Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher but she was determined to become a writer. Her first mystery novel followed a visit to the theatre when she saw The Cat and the Canary then, Tragedy at Freyne, featuring Scott Egerton who later appeared in 10 novels, was published in 1927. She adopted the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert to publish detective novels which achieved great success and made her a name in British detective literature, although many of her readers had always believed that they were reading a male author. She went on to publish 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas. Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the aristocratic detectives who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him, such as Lord Peter Wimsey. Instead of dispassionately analyzing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethicality to clear him or her. The first Crook novel, Murder by Experts, was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel, A Nice Little Killing, was published in 1974. Her thriller The Woman in Red (1941) was broadcast in the United States by CBS and made into a film in 1945 under the title My Name is Julia Ross. She never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.
