Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Spencer Gore, Robert Bevan and Walter Sickert. A young man takes a post at a lonely house called Bittermeads under a false name, looking for a missing man, and finds a packing case, a girl who will not explain herself, and a household where everyone is watching everyone. Punshon spent years as a laborer in Canada and America before settling to write some fifty detective novels; Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed him with real admiration, and this early one shows why. Sixty plates of quiet interiors, lamplit streets and harbour scenes by painters such as John Atkinson Grimshaw and Carl Holsøe carry the watchful, half-lit mood of the novel through its length.