It is May, 1930. In this forty-first Cyrus Skeen novel, Skeen rushes Dilys, his wife, to the hospital after she has fainted and fallen in her studio. She has damaged the area where a thug had sapped her with a pistol two months earlier when she and Skeen were ambushed in Huntington Park soon after the Pickwick Stage affair. The doctor at North Bay Hospital says that Dilys must undergo surgery to remove a loose bone fragment from her brain. It will...