**Handed a mysterious package, a woman finds herself caught in a deadly game**

Her name is not Eliza Williams. A fashionable young woman with a taste for adventurous men, she made the mistake of falling in love with Towner Clay—a New York City playboy whose international jetsetting conceals dangerous secrets. On Towner’s behalf, she has spent six months pretending to be Eliza Williams, a dowdy Midtown secretary. It’s dull work until the day Gavin Keane, a blue-eyed associate of Towner’s, leaves her with a mysterious package. Eliza understands that protecting it is a question of life and death. When he comes to pick up the package that night, Gavin is followed, and he shoots the man to protect the parcel’s secret. With blood on her carpet and a mystery on her hands, the woman who is not Eliza will have to act quickly to survive.

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### Review

“Extraordinary . . . [Hughes’s] brilliant descriptive powers make and unmake reality.” —*The New Yorker*

“[Hughes’s] novels are carefully crafted pieces, ahead of their time in their use of psychological suspense and their piercing observations about class and race. She was among the best.” —Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins novels

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“Puts Chandler to shame . . . Hughes is the master we keep turning to.” —Sara Paretsky, author of the V. I. Warshawski novels

### About the Author

Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was a mystery author and literary critic. Born in Kansas City, she studied at Columbia University, and won an award from the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her first book, the poetry collection *Dark Certainty* (1931). After writing several unsuccessful manuscripts, she published *The So Blue Marble* in 1940. A New York–based mystery, it won praise for its hardboiled prose, which was due, in part, to Hughes’s editor, who demanded she cut 25,000 words from the book.

Hughes published thirteen more novels, the best known of which are *In a Lonely Place* (1947) and *Ride the Pink Horse* (1946). Both were made into successful films. In the early fifties, Hughes largely stopped writing fiction, preferring to focus on criticism, for which she would go on to win an Edgar Award. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America presented Hughes with the Grand Master Award for literary achievement