Perilous Quest — Jennifer Ames

Hong Kong! Gail Stewart felt a tremor of excitement course through her at the sound of that name. Wonderingly, she looked across the desk at Grant Raeburn. Would she go with him, his secretary, and young Dr. Bobby Gordon, as the fourth member of their research team, to the Henderson Institute for Eastern Diseases at Hong Kong? he had asked.

Hong Kong! To be invited there by the handsome and brilliant Dr. Grant Raeburn was an honor; no man was more dedicated, more satisfying for a young nurse such as Gail to work with. But to go to Hong Kong -- the city in which she had been born and from which she had escaped, the city where… Remembering now, Gail realized that she had always intended to return. She had a score to settle in Hong Kong.

It had been years ago, during the Occupation; Gail had been too young to know his name, but there had been a “friend” who had betrayed her parents to the enemy the very night of their planned escape to freedom. Gail alone had gotten away. Now, there were her parents' deaths to be avenged, there was the family fortune to recover. Somewhere in that teeming, fascinating city of her childhood, she must find the unknown betrayer -- a ruthless murderer and thief. Working at the Henderson Institute in Hong Kong would give her the chance to pursue her quest carefully and methodically.

But even as she accepted Grant Raeburn's invitation, Gail's trip to Hong Kong was ill-omened. An aunt's illness delays her departure, and when later, Gail flies out to join the others in Hong Kong, her plane crashes in the mountains. As she tends the injured, she becomes very close to the good-looking Brett Dyson, the passenger who had sat beside her on the plane. By the time the survivors are rescued and can resume their flight, Gail and Brett are in love.

It is this love for Brett that causes a disturbing rift in Gail's relations with Grant Raeburn once she reaches Hong Kong. Back home, Grant had extracted from her a promise that if he took her to Hong Kong she would not marry for two years, and now he shows himself determined to keep her to that promise -- while displaying at the same time a surprising and sudden personal interest in her. Brett had his ebullient godfather, Tom Manning, go to extraordinary means to force Gail to break that promise -- and to forsake her dangerous mission, which they say can bring her only grief.

But no one -- Brett nor his godfather, Grant Raeburn nor the devoted Bobby Gordon, not even the mysterious Ernest Wong -- can deflect Gail from pursuing her perilous quest to its startling conclusion.