'The plot does not open, however, with the conventlonal corpse lying in a magnificently furnished flat. Only gradually does a feeling of strange, unknown forces envelop the group of people who confront the hero in the early chapters. He overtakes a girl on the road from London to Folkestone. She has a puncture in one of the back tyres of her grey two seater car; and does not know how to change the wheel; so Richard Saxenham (as the young man Is named) jumps out and offers to help her. She attracts him. So when (after he has performed the wheel-changing service and she has driven off), he finds In the roadway a green morocco case with an address at Folkestone in it, he feels no small satisfaction. The address proves to be that of a stone house, in which the girl lives with her uncle and a foreign couple. They seem an ill-assorted group. The young man's suspicions are aroused. Then, directly he returns to his hotel, a stranger he meets in the lounge begins unaccountably to ramble on to him about some diamond robbery that Is reported In the morning's newspaper. The mystery surrounding the family in the stone house deepens when Saxenham discovers that the stranger's activities are linked in some way with theirs. Presently the residents in the stone house disappear, leaving behind them the corpse beloved of writers of detective fiction, and it becomes the task of Scotland Yard to track them down again.'
Source:
'Our New Serial', Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1931, p.4.
