Louis Joseph Vance

Shop-girl accidentally gets into New York high society and an intrigue (Gutenberg).

Michael Lanyard—“The Lone Wolf,” as the Paris police and criminal world called him, from his habit of invariably working without a confederate—is one of the best known and most romantic figures in the fiction of crime. There is something fascinating in the coolness and cleverness of this gentleman among crooks, something appealing in the surprising extent of his knowledge of art and good society, and in the masterly cleanness of his coups. In this new account of his more recent activities, when, urged on by his love for a good woman, he stages a life and-death fight against a powerful underworld gang headed by the “Bootlegger King’’ of New York, Mr. Vance has given us what will be generally hailed as by all odds the best of his “Lone Wolf” stories.