first edition Hardcover
(c.1955) · New York
by McCloy, Helen
New York: Random House. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1955). First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [book is just lightly shelfworn, with a bit of light staining to the dark topstain at the top of the text block, a previous owner's name and scribbled note at top of front endpaper, vintage bookseller's label (Lauriat's, Boston & Chestnut Hill) at bottom left corner of front endpaper, and the previous owner's has written "Brett Halliday's wife" below the author's name on the title page; the jacket is lightly worn at edges and extremities, with some light soiling to the rear panel and along the inside edge of the rear flap-fold]. Mystery novel about a woman who, when cleaning out the desk of her husband "after his seemingly accidental death," comes across an envelope addressed to a woman she's never heard of. She seeks the woman out, which sets off "a grim series of events" that puts her life, and that of her son, in danger. The solving of the case goes to the author's go-to detective-hero, "the astute police psychologist, Dr. Basil Willing," this being the tenth of her books in which he figured, and of whom she once wrote: "he wsa, I believe, the first American psychiatrist detective and I am pretty sure he was the first psychiatrist detective to use psychiatry in detecting clues as well as in analyzing the criminal mind." . (Inventory #: 26947)