The Velvet Hand — Helen Reilly

Darlings -- Don't worry about me. You'll be hearing from us in a few days.

The unsigned note clearly written in a state of emotional upset and left on the dresser in Libby's disordered room indicated an elopement. That was shocking enough to Kit Haven and her well-to-do uncle Philip, with whom Libby lived. Then a whispering voice spoke over the phone and the terror descended. In spite of a state trooper patrolling the house, the murderer struck.

The subsequent investigation tossed up strange things, and people: an unemployed Adonis, Tony Wilder, who claimed to be Libby's fiancé; Samuel Pedrick, a café society “press agent”; and his mistress, Eleanor Oaks, an ex-actress who once figured in a murder case. There is no apparent link between these people whose habitat is New York and Philip Haven who lives in Connecticut.

Inspector McKee of the New York Homicide Squad succeeds in making the connection and finds it amazingly close. Not close enough, though, to account for Kit's feeling that a velvet hand seems to be nudging them along, a hand belonging to someone who knows the house, and their habits, their very ways of thinking; a hand that has killed once and threatens to kill again. Kit, Philip and Libby flee, in vain. The hand follows them unerringly to their hideaway.