The Changeling Conspiracy // Cruel As The Grave — Helen McCloy

Adam Endicott did not want Sam Joel as a husband for his young daughter, Kate. Sam was fifteen years older than Kate, he never talked about his past, which had been spent largely in the Far East, and he had no visible assets but his meager salary as reporter on a small town newspaper. Yet when Kate was abducted by a terrorist group. Sam was able to produce a large sum of money to help pay the ransom. He did not say where he had got it.

The terrorists called themselves Hashashin after the Muslim heretic sect of the eleventh century who gave us the word "assassin." Paying the ransom they demanded did not bring back Kate. It led only to the murder of someone else.

It was then that Sam, who loved Kate, set out alone to find her, knowing he had two strikes against him: the capricious fanaticism of the kidnappers and the hostility of the police to himself, rooted in his own dubious past.

He finds a girl who seems to be Kate, but is she? He knows Kate's experience will have changed her, but can it have changed her this much? Is this the girl he loves, or a changeling?

Also published as: Cruel As the Grave