The request was an odd one, and it came to Quinn from an unlikely source. Her name was Sister Blessing of the Salvation, and she belonged to a quasi-religious colony which had established itself in the California mountains, far from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Though money was forbidden in the colony, she paid Quinn one hundred and twenty dollars to find out if a man named Patrick O’Gorman was still living in the desert town of Chicote. It turned out that O’Gorman had disappeared under mysterious circumstances five years before. As Quinn investigated these circumstances, he discovered that Sister Blessing and some of her fellow colonists were as deeply involved with the world and the flesh as the people of Chicote. He saw their lives disrupted by violent passions and ultimately by violent death. As the intricate design of this novel emerges, it builds a pattern of mounting terror which reaches its climax on the last page, Mrs. Millar has never told a story of such sweep, ranging from the mountains to the desert, from a millionaire’s yacht to a cell in die state penitentiary, and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. Beginning with Quinn himself, the young detective who has his own moral problems, the characters are depicted with wit and penetration. This is perhaps the most compelling novel that Margaret Millar has given us in the course of her continually surprising career