Lieutenant Luis Mendoza celebrates his birthday with a more than usually exuberant outburst of murder and mayhem.

What has happened to the abducted Nurse Bradley? What fiend could have tied up Lila Wescott and whipped her while she suffocated? And who can be trying to poison Mr and Mrs Beebe with arsenic? Mendoza puts his hunches to the test . . .

''A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense'' Los Angeles Times