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The Girl With No Place to Hide
THE GIRL WITH NO PLACE TO
The woman comes into the bar and catches Jake’s attention immediately. Not beautiful, but there is something striking about her. She asks for Steve Canby, who’s just left, and dismisses Jake with a glance. Then she leaves. Jake doesn’t think much of it until he comes out of the bar and finds the woman being choked by a huge hulk of a man. Coming to her rescue, he barely manages to keep from being strangled himself.
Later, they end up at his apartment. Her name is Angela, and she just wants someplace safe to spend the night. Someone is out to get her. Jake Barrow is a private detective between jobs, so he agrees. But later that night when he returns from a false alarm from someone claiming to want his services, he finds her gone. Was the call a ruse? Who knew she was here? But this is just the beginning—it’s not long before his pursuit of Angela leads to murder.
The woman comes into the bar and catches Jake’s attention immediately. Not beautiful, but there is something striking about her. She asks for Steve Canby, who’s just left, and dismisses Jake with a glance. Then she leaves. Jake doesn’t think much of it until he comes out of the bar and finds the woman being choked by a huge hulk of a man. Coming to her rescue, he barely manages to keep from being strangled himself.
Later, they end up at his apartment. Her name is Angela, and she just wants someplace safe to spend the night. Someone is out to get her. Jake Barrow is a private detective between jobs, so he agrees. But later that night when he returns from a false alarm from someone claiming to want his services, he finds her gone. Was the call a ruse? Who knew she was here? But this is just the beginning—it’s not long before his pursuit of Angela leads to murder.
192 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 7, 2022
From 1959
This has some quite good scenes, not a bad mystery, not badly written. But I just get so bored of detectives (except Ross MacDonald, who is the best). To me the story is so much better, so much more interesting, when the characters aren't being paid to fight crime.
This has some quite good scenes, not a bad mystery, not badly written. But I just get so bored of detectives (except Ross MacDonald, who is the best). To me the story is so much better, so much more interesting, when the characters aren't being paid to fight crime.
June 17, 2025
Between 1958 and 1961, Marvin H. Albert wrote six novels in the Jake Barrow private eye series under the pseudonym Nick Quarry. They are: (1) The Hoods Come Calling (1958); (2) The Girl with No Place to Hide (1959); (3) Trail of a Tramp (1960); (4) Till It Hurts (1960); (5) No Chance in Hell (1960); and (6) Some Die Hard (1961). Black Gat Books (an imprint of Stark House Press) has more recently republished “The Girl With No Place to Hide” with a new cover by Ed Balcourt in 2021.
“The Girl With No Place to Hide” is a quick-moving action-packed tale that can be easily read in a single evening. Set in New York City, the plot has Barrow stumbling on a case without a client (at least most of the way through the book), reeling from violence on all sides and not knowing what is going on.
As it begins, Barrow is at the Oran Club run by his pal and fight promoter, Steve Canby. After Canby leaves to take the party elsewhere, Barrow meets the femme fatale (Angela), whose “features weren’t regular enough for her to be called beautiful,” but who “had a pair of saucy, snapping dark eyes and a mass of black hair soft and smooth as down. She had a down-right arrogant figure, too. And a way of holding it without thinking about it calculated to make a man squirm.” After rescuing her from being assaulted and possibly murdered in the alley near the club, Barrow seemingly adopts Angela, “She was more than willing to go up to my place She was desperately eager. The tension of her made me look in the rear-view mirror one last time. There was still no one following us. But I couldn’t say, afterward, that I’d had no warning I was getting into something messy.” Thus, it begins with Barrow meeting a girl who was Trouble with a capital T. “She didn’t have to be beautiful; everything about her was provocative. And no one knew it better than she did.” “She walked with arrogant femaleness.”
But it turns sour quickly as Barrow is called away from his apartment to a false lead, Angela scurries off into the night, and her statement that Ernie was in trouble and she was next haunts Barrow as he sees an Ernest was murdered in the morning paper. And not just murdered, but tied up by his wrists and ankles and bloodied beyond recognition. “They got Ernie . . . now they’re after me,” Angela had said. Soon, Barrow finds himself protecting Ernest’s secretary from a hit-and-run attempted murder, shooting it out in the street, facing of with tough guy goons, duking it out with a muscle-bound showboat on a Connecticut estate, and face-to-face with small-town police brutality.
None of it makes much sense until he finally puts it together in the end, but what makes this novel work so well is the non-stop action that permeates it from cover to cover.
“The Girl With No Place to Hide” is a quick-moving action-packed tale that can be easily read in a single evening. Set in New York City, the plot has Barrow stumbling on a case without a client (at least most of the way through the book), reeling from violence on all sides and not knowing what is going on.
As it begins, Barrow is at the Oran Club run by his pal and fight promoter, Steve Canby. After Canby leaves to take the party elsewhere, Barrow meets the femme fatale (Angela), whose “features weren’t regular enough for her to be called beautiful,” but who “had a pair of saucy, snapping dark eyes and a mass of black hair soft and smooth as down. She had a down-right arrogant figure, too. And a way of holding it without thinking about it calculated to make a man squirm.” After rescuing her from being assaulted and possibly murdered in the alley near the club, Barrow seemingly adopts Angela, “She was more than willing to go up to my place She was desperately eager. The tension of her made me look in the rear-view mirror one last time. There was still no one following us. But I couldn’t say, afterward, that I’d had no warning I was getting into something messy.” Thus, it begins with Barrow meeting a girl who was Trouble with a capital T. “She didn’t have to be beautiful; everything about her was provocative. And no one knew it better than she did.” “She walked with arrogant femaleness.”
But it turns sour quickly as Barrow is called away from his apartment to a false lead, Angela scurries off into the night, and her statement that Ernie was in trouble and she was next haunts Barrow as he sees an Ernest was murdered in the morning paper. And not just murdered, but tied up by his wrists and ankles and bloodied beyond recognition. “They got Ernie . . . now they’re after me,” Angela had said. Soon, Barrow finds himself protecting Ernest’s secretary from a hit-and-run attempted murder, shooting it out in the street, facing of with tough guy goons, duking it out with a muscle-bound showboat on a Connecticut estate, and face-to-face with small-town police brutality.
None of it makes much sense until he finally puts it together in the end, but what makes this novel work so well is the non-stop action that permeates it from cover to cover.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews