If you like period pieces and murder-mysteries with a twist of romance, you will enjoy this book. The protagonist becomes the chief suspect in the murder of Sir Geoffrey Kynaston and must clear his name. Set in Victorian England, there are flashbacks to Italy. Filled with aristocrats, there are colorful characters, too, lending an air of the Dickensian comic relief, ― like the money-obsessed private sleuth. E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was an enormously popular and prolific writer of suspense fiction and romance. Notably easy to read, Mr. Oppenheim has few equals among modern English novelists. He is untiring in the invention of mysterious plots, he is a clever weaver of the plausible with the sensational, and he has the necessary gift of facile narrative. (Boston Transcript.) He is a master of the art of telling a story. He has humor, a keen sense of the dramatic, and a knack of turning out a happy ending just when the complications of the plot threaten worse disasters. (New York Times.)

From Scotland Yard to International Intrigue Malcolm Gossett is a Scotland Yard detective, fed up by the endless conferences and hierarchy of The Yard, he resigns his position and establishes himself as a private investigator, specializing in helping hopeless cases. Clients whom everyone believes to be guilty. There is a great sequence of mysterious cases; International commerce and politics, kidnapping and the international sex trade, Indian succession, jewel theft, and romance. One curious case "The Wise Man from the West" involves the financial gamble of an Asian Leather Consortium, and the beautiful Selah Nissim, daughter of a Singaporean merchant prince. Oppenheim spent many years in the wholesale leather industry, and his description of the warehouses and factories is characteristically accurate. Written in 1933, many of the stories in this collection focus on both personal and global financial problems.