First Things: A Detective Novel of 1929

by Edward Cline

It is late April, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in The Janus Affair involving the murder of a prominent commercial artist by apprehending the murderers of an advertising agency’s office manager. He has just seen off his wife, Dilys, on a train to visit some relatives back East near Boston. She will be gone for about a week and a half, until early May. Skeen is visited in his office at Skeen Investigations one Monday morning by a seventeen-year-old boy, William Yeager, who asks Skeen to find his girlfriend, Darla Rampling, whom he last saw two weeks previously. What at first startles Skeen is that the boy is wearing the blazer and school tie of his old high school, Grafton Preparatory, in Rensselaer, upstate New York. Yeager tells Skeen that he admired him and thought he would be able to locate Miss Rampling. They had last met before Yeager accompanied his parents on a vacation. When he returned, the girl was gone and her adoptive parents said that she had run away. The boy did not quite believe them. After collecting some evidence, Skeen begins to not believe them, either.First Things is the sixteenth installment of the Skeen Mysteries.

92 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 11, 2016

About the author

Edward Cline is an American novelist and essayist. He is best known for his Sparrowhawk series of novels, which take place in England and Virginia before the American Revolutionary War. He is also the author of First Prize and Whisper the Guns. Outside of his work as a novelist, Cline is known for his writings on esthetics and his defense of capitalism and of free speech. As a writer, his strongest influence has been the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand. Currently, he is a policy analyst for the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. He lives in Yorktown, Virginia.





from wikipedia.com

Reviews

[Dwayne Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the most upsetting of Cyrus Skeen's adventures, First Things starts out innocently then grows in depredation to a conclusion that reveals the darkness of two San Francisco benevolent institutions.

This would have been a five-star book, but there are an unfortunately large number of errors that should have been edited.