copyright 1959; "A Novel of Suspense"; Book Club Edition; Farrar, Straus and Cudahy publishers, New York; hardbound in baby blue boards with black lettering along spine; very good conditon with unmarked pages; dust jacket good but has some edge fraying.
 
Kirkus Review -
Unexpected wealth and a big mansion carry their penalties and Allan Lambert was ripe for anything to happen. Happen it did, in the form of one of the notorious (though this he did not learn until later) ""Spanish Prisoner letters"" which fitted in aptly with his need of a goal for his sabbatical year. So he splurged with a big new station wagon; he took ship for Spain; and- half accepting the fact that the letter was a hoax, he found himself launched on a series of adventures and misadventures, strange encounters and romance, bafflement on the part of the Embassy and the local police over an American who allowed himself to be taken in by an old gag.
 
Various clues linked the family of one time wealth and fame to the case; the Duke was virtually a prisoner of his debts in a private clinic, his sister and daughter were working in the hotel where Allan was staying; and the devil in the piece was a man named Crewe, an American of unsavory reputation in Madrid, whose wife, Ethel, had almost captured Allan in her glamorous web on the crossing to Spain. While the plot is tenuous, the suspense illusory, the characters and the incidents keep one reading. And the atmosphere is pleasantly convincing and provocative for the would-be Spanish tourist. Not Mrs. Keyes at her best, but a welcome relief for pleasant time passing in the late summer doldrums.