Virginia Perdue

At midnight, in the garden, Jacklin Bogart finds the body of her cousin Antoinette stabbed in the back. As a witness, the evidence she can provide is critical to the police. As the police take charge, the backgrounds of the Crandall and Bogart families are revealed, seen from different angles. The characters come on focus. More than one member of the Crandall family has met with violent death: Was it suicide or murder? As more is known, the perspective changes, the confusion appears to increase, but perhaps it is the truth that starts to emerge.

The fifth and last book by the author, it starts literally with a bang and ends with one of the most chilling lines in the history of the genre. Gasoline is in short supply as World War II rages on in Europe and the Far East. Ultimate victory requires a reliable source of gasoline. Nick Matheny's oil company just might have the answer in nicoline, a cheap synthetic fuel. The Nazis would love to get their hands on it while rival oil companies fear it could destroy their industry and bankrupt their companies. On the eve of his flight to Washington with the secret formula, Matheny is attacked, suffering a severe brain injury that leaves him with partial memory loss. When he comes to in a sanitarium where his wife has committed him, he has only a vague idea of who he is and how he got there. As his memory returns in spurts, Matheny relives the events of that night and realizes that he must defy his doctor and escape from the hospital in order to catch both a killer and a saboteur and possibly help win the war.

Virginia Perdue was an America writer of mystery novels. Very little is known of her, and her output was limited by comparison with other writers of the mid-20th Century. Yet, her books were published as Doubleday Crime Club selections and one, "He Fell Down Dead," was made into the 1946 movie "Shadow of a Woman." Two of her mysteries feature the character of Eleanora Burke, a five foot eleven, two hundred pound investigator for the district attorney's office. The first of the two is "The Case of the Grieving Monkey," in which Burke his involved in a case of attempted murder by poison. In this briskly paced and entertaining story, Eleanora poses as an old friend of Marian Gantley, a wealthy explorer who is convinced that someone tried to poison her in two occasions. In her disguise, she sets out to discover which member of Marian Gantley’s household in the Hollywood hills may be the culprit.