Violet Gamlen had been missing for a year. Speculation and rumour ran wild, but one person thought he knew her whereabouts-I kept trying to work out what was wrong with this cover, until I realised that the artist had problems with both perspective and proportion. The cat leaping out at our frightened heroine is seemingly enormous, and meanwhile the lady herself appears to have a very large right arm and a very small left one.
'Don't you see, that man's started gardening again. He couldn't bury a body amongst all that weed without the signs of digging betraying him, but when it's been all freshly dug...'
Not that it matters, because the mystery of what happened to Violet Gamlen and who was responsible for it was enthralling and kept me guessing until the end. Elizabeth Ferrars is one of those writers who is now less well known than she should be given the length of her career and the number of books she wrote. However, unlike some of her better known contemporaries (Ngaio Marsh, for example) most of her books are standalone novels. The lack of a continuing detective hero probably made her "brand" less memorable than it could have been.
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