Overview

It is May, 1930. In this forty-first Cyrus Skeen novel, Skeen rushes Dilys, his wife, to the hospital after she has fainted and fallen in her studio. She has damaged the area where a thug had sapped her with a pistol two months earlier when she and Skeen were ambushed in Huntington Park soon after the Pickwick Stage affair. The doctor at North Bay Hospital says that Dilys must undergo surgery to remove a loose bone fragment from her brain. It will be a simple but delicate operation. If successful, it may affect her ability to paint again. But if the operation is not successful, she may die. In two parts, Gallery introduces Skeen to a new phase of his life.Recovered from her surgery, Dilys resumes her painting ambitions, starting with a portrait of Joan of Arc. In the meantime, Skeen is almost ambushed by Soviet agents who want revenge for his foiling a Russian plot earlier in the year.