Lieutenant Luis Mendoza celebrates his birthday with a more than usually exuberant outburst of murder and mayhem.
What has happened to the abducted Nurse Bradley? What fiend could have tied up Lila Wescott and whipped her while she suffocated? And who can be trying to poison Mr and Mrs Beebe with arsenic? Mendoza puts his hunches to the test . . .
'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times
In her 67 years, California author Elizabeth Linington wrote 82 crime fiction novels, under her own name as well as the aliases Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill and Dell Shannon. Her writing evolved from the early radio and stage dramas, via historical narratives, to her most celebrated novels - mysteries. She was nominated for Edgars in 1961, 1962 and 1963 for Case Pending, Nightmare and Knave of Hearts respectively. Her most successful creation, debonair LAPD Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, broke new ground in being one of the first Latino police officers in the procedural genre, and Linington herself was a pioneer in a male-dominated industry, earning the moniker 'Queen of the Procedurals'.