The silver blade

In a city of banks and boarding houses, the genteel quiet of the Westbrook and Fairchild families shatters when General Peyton Westbrook’s distinguished Mexican associate, Señor Alberto de Sanchez, is found stabbed to death with a delicate silver paper-knife engraved “Paquita.” Captain John Converse, a massive, impassive detective, sorts through a tangle of clues—a scented lace handkerchief, odd brown cigarette butts, and a mysterious woman’s passage through the Nettleton Building—while Clay Fairchild, a poor but honorable law clerk with literary dreams, vanishes into the night and Joyce Westbrook, proud and fragile, faces a swelling tide of suspicion she refuses to dispel. As gossip and headlines circle high society, Joyce’s frozen silence, her secret love for Clay, and the ominous influence of her coldly self-controlled mother Louise deepen the sense that the crime is bound up with an old scandal and a bargain that may cost Joyce her freedom—or her life.