"You think Roy's guilty, and unless I can make you believe me-"
"I've nothing to go on yet," he protested. "But I suppose the police had a case."
"Yes. Oh, yes. A very good one. It was at a party, you see, and they found the emeralds in his pocket."
When the beautiful Italian movie star Giuditta of the Anglo-Italian Film Company is coshed in her dressing room and her fabled d'Albret emerald necklace stolen, Roy Bromley, who was found almost immediately afterward with the string of dazzlers in his pocket, is arrested, tried and convicted for the crime. Jo Marston, Roy's eighteen-year-old ingenue film actress fiancée, implores barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland to take up the case on appeal. After one of the other suspects in the jewel theft is murdered, it appears that a ruthless criminal gang is involved in the affair, and that it will stop at nothing to put an end to Antony's investigations. Will Antony be able to discover the truth behind the mystery, allowing young love to triumph over treacherous adversity?
This gripping courtroom drama from 1967 features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
Autorentext
Sara Woods, the pen name of Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd, was bornin 1916 in Bradford, Yorkshire. She was the daughter of Francis Burton Hutton, a garage proprietor and Sara Roberta Woods, the daughter of a buyer for an engineering firm.In 1946 she married electrical engineer Anthony George Bowen Judd. Following a dozen years of farming in rural Yorkshire, the couple moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1958, where Sara began her prolific mystery writing career. She became well-known for her detective series featuring canny barrister Antony Maitland - a character inspired by her beloved older brother, Antony Woods Hutton, a promising young solicitor who was tragically killed in 1941 at the age of 33 when as a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War his plane was shot down during action in Egypt.Sara Woods' detective novels were celebrated for their intricate plots and the authenticity of their courtroom settings and they garnered a longtime, loyal readership. Sara passed away at the age of 69 on November 6, 1985, leaving behind her a rich legacy of four dozen Antony Maitland mysteries.