'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune
Jewel, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, has disappeared from her home in a squalid suburb of Los Angeles. A popular young salesman, Steven Wray, is found slumped over the wheel of his car, dead from an overdose. A respectable old lady left her sister's some weeks ago, but to the alarm of her daughter has still not arrived home. A petrol station is held up and its unresisting attendant needlessly shot dead.
This all leads us in the end to Steve Wray's very curious secret; to an atrocious discovery in a walled-up bathroom; and, at last, to Jewel herself . . .
