JAMES HADLEY CHASE

Lay Her Among The Lilies / Too Dangerous to Be Free

      
     It was a  mystery that a healthy young heiress like Janet Crosby (no relation to Bing Crosby) should die of heart  failure. Odder still that on the day she died, she sent a note and a hefty retainer to Vic Malloy of Universal Services, asking him to trace the person who was blackmailing her sister, Maureen. Intrigued by the note. Malloy tried to see Maureen Crosby, but only got as far as her nurse, a curvaceous blonde with an engaging bedside manner. Next he tried to see Janet's personal maid, but found that somebody else had reached her first and made sure that she wouldn't talk to anyone - ever again.  Malloy realised that unless he dropped the case, he himself, almost certainly, would become the unknown killer's next victim; but when the blonde nurse disappeared and a hired gunman tried to shoot him, it seemed that Malloy didn't have any choice left. Malloy had to get to the bottom of the whole affair, although he had now been kidnapped, renamed as Edmund Seabright and incarcerated in a high security private asylum, with a maniacal killer as a room partner....