Van Tassel Sutphen

If you had been Hugh Hildebrand, but lately fallen heir to his ancestral estates, would you have surrendered your fair possessions to an Unknown Terror? Or would you have chosen, as Hildebrand did, to contend against the mysterious force that brought death to each succeeding lord of the manor? Hildebrand's predecessor had been sitting in his quiet library when he was struck down by a mysterious power. There was something waiting in that peaceful room waiting in sinister silence to kill the newcomer. Betty Hildebrand finally found the key to the riddle, but it was only at the last minute that she learned how to use it.

Here is a fantastic tale, or series of tales, in which an attempt is made to introduce the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights into the life of workaday New York, not with entire success. Hypnotism, electricity, radium, and infernal machines of various potencies are a few of the cheerful elements played with. The hero, Esper Indiman, is a recognizable blend of Haroun Al-Raschid and Sherlock Holmes; and, if ever a man swings on the gates of chance without coming a cropper, he certainly does. His exit from the book is at least sequel-provoking, if nothing more. As a whole, the story has many moments of interest and one or two thrills, but it is not for a single minute plausible, and does not show the author at his best. — The Literary World, August 1904

Nicholas Cary, a New York newspaper editor, chances on a cinematograph exhibit including a scene from Dover pier. The face of a woman in the film haunts him, and he travels to Europe in hopes of finding her, only to become entangled in an international intrigue.