The Sophisticates

New York: Horace Liveright. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1931. 4th printing. Hardcover. [nice tight copy, apparently unread, just a trace of wear to bottom edge, vintage price sticker (from the famous San Francisco department store, The White House) on rear pastedown; jacket a little rubbed and soiled, with a few tiny edge-nicks, soft diagonal crease in rear flap]. Novel about the "young, beautiful and incomprehensible ruler of the sophisticated set in a middle Western town," a woman who compensates for her unhappy marriage to a middle-aged banker by channeling her intellectual striving into the organization of a salon comprised of the local intelligentsia, such as they are. "Fascinating, enigmatic, maddening to the half dozen men who adored her, she seemed to be a woman of ice. Was she also a murderess?" (The latter question arises when her husband is found poisoned, and she is subsequently put on trial for the crime.) .