But even before his ship sails from New York, the atmosphere becomes charged with sinister omens.In the course of the voyage one mysterious event follows another. After his arrival in Europe, a series of baffling encounters and the abrupt disappearance of a friend and colleague combine to intensify his mounting sense of danger.Before long Strang joins the struggle against a monstrous and terrifying conspiracy which may affect all mankind, and long before it reaches its climax, Strang himself and Cecilia Hillard, the lovely American girl with whom he has fallen in love, are in deadly peril.

    A journey into a world of fear and violence carried to their logical extreme—murder.

    

    

    The son of a rich New England family, he learns early in life that society expects certain attitudes and reactions of him. And with the dazzling cunning of his mind he sets out to satisfy his society, aping all its grimaces of pain and pleasure, feeling, all the while, nothing. Charlie Carewe's clinical lack of empathy makes him a potential killer and pervert as is first manifest in his blinding of a childhood friend, his attack on a girl at college, and later in bigamy, blackmail and the criminal carelessness which results in the death of his crippled brother-in-law and young niece. Although the clinical facts of Mary Astor's book are intriguing and indispensable to her novel, they are not presented here as a treatise on psychopathology but are woven into an engrossing story of a man and those he hurts. The fact of madness is handled with imagination so that Charlie Carewe emerges as a force of evil almost mystical in proportion, while the struggle of those surrounding him is woven into a pattern of credible and interesting events.