No Hero…A woman from his past…A mysterious, sealed letter…A mountain with a deadly reputation…What brings these things together? And will they confirm or deny a man’s assertion that he is no hero? The scene is laid in Switzerland, with a background of piquant hotel gossip, the narrative being in the words of a friend of the boy’s mother who has undertaken the task of disillusionizing the lad. The result is as unconventional as it is unexpected. ‘A clever, fresh, well-told story with more than the usual measure of art in its telling.’

Since his friend and partner in crime, A. J. Raffles, jumped into the Mediterranean, Bunny Manders has scraped along as best he can. At Raffles’s side, he was witness to, and participant in, the most ingenious burglaries the underworld had ever seen. Without him, Bunny is a struggling ex-convict, so down on his luck that he answers an ad seeking a male nurse and companion for a notoriously rude invalid. But when he lights the old man’s Sullivan cigarette and sees a perfect smoke ring float into the air, Bunny cries out in delight. Raffles is back, and ready for adventure. In the second installment in E. W. Hornung’s crackerjack crime series, England’s greatest jewel thief is up to all of his old tricks and many ingenious new ones—none so spectacular as turning Queen Victoria herself into an accomplice

Detective and mystery stories, Australian

Rachel Minchin stands in the dock, accused of murdering the dissolute husband she was preparing to leave. The trial is sensational, and public opinion vehemently and almost universally against her. When the jury astonishes and outrages the world with a vedict of not Guilty, Rachel quickly finds herself in need of protection. It comes in the form of a surprising offer of marriage from a mysterious stranger who has sat through every day of her trial. The marriage to this intriguing stranger, Mr. Steel, is by mutual agreement to be a platonic one, the only condition of which is that neither is ever to question the other about the past. The two travel to Steel’s remote country estate, where Rachel accidentally discovers that her second husband’s past was somehow intertwined with her first husband’s history - but how, exactly, and why he determined to marry her, Steel will not say. As her doubts about her husband increase, local busybodies threaten to unearth Rachel’s own past. And that is the least of the secrets that comes to light as this entertaining mystery unfolds