The premise of Margaret Millar’s new suspense novel is simple and shocking. Charlie Gowen, a handsome young man with a badly disordered past, finds himself profoundly drawn toward a nine-year-old girl. His past record suggests, even to Charlie himself, that his sick passion for little Jessie is placing her life in jeopardy. But he can’t stay away from her school, her street, her house.

If the premise of Mrs. Millar’s story is simple enough, its development is complex and compelling. Charlie’s fiancée Louise, who loves him desperately, risks her life in an effort to save him from the dark forces of his own nature. Half a dozen other adults, Jessie’s parents, friends and neighbors, become involved in the network of guilt and menace which surrounds the child. Without sacrificing its quality of almost unbearable suspense, this novel makes a searching and scathing inquiry into the guilty relations of adults with children. To read it is a shaking experience.

Did she fall?

When Mrs. Wilma Wyatt crashed to her death from the balcony of her room in a Mexico City hotel, no one knew whether it was an accident, suicide or murder.

And when, shortly after, her friend and travelling companion, Amy Kellogg, disappeared into thin air, the mystery deepened. Did Wilma fall...?

Or was she pushed?

Virginia Barkeley spoiled child of a wealthy family, sat it a Michigan jail cell and refused to answer even her lawyer’s questions. Her husband knew that she had been intimate with Claude Margolis. Her mother knew that Virginia was capable of killing a man with a knife. Even Meecham, her lawyer, believed that she was guilty, so far as he believed anything at all.

Then Meecham was approached by a young man with a weirdly distorted body and death in his face. His name was Earl Duane Loftus. and he brought with him a signed confession which the police were unable to pick to pieces. If Loftus was lying, his lie seemed as unshakable as truth itself. But if Loftus was telling the truth, he had killed on impulse a man he had never seen before.

Meecham, a doubter by nature, doubted this. He resolved to probe the lives beneath the obvious police case: the ingrown hatreds which flourished subtly behind the social facade which Virginia Barkeley’s family tried to maintain; the side streets and dark alleys of frustration where Earl Loftus had developed his twisted idealism. Somewhere, he suspected. he would find a link between these two lives and the death of Margolis. But the truth he found was unexpected and shocking. In the climax of his search, Meecham caught a flashing glimpse of a tragic reality, redeemed by a love which was literally stronger than death.

Here is a mystery novel in the great tradition. Its author, Margaret Millar, has forged two reputations in the past ten years, one as a brilliant writer of mystery stories, one as a serious novelist. In this book her diverse talents have merged completely to produce a baffling mystery which is also a first-rate novel.