Fourteen miles off the tail-end of Andros Island in the West Indies lies the island called Dark Bahama, which, says the guide-book, is a natural paradise, a slice of heaven in a summer sea. Many people, not particularly looking for trouble, have discovered that they can find plenty of it in a place where the atmosphere is filled with sunlight and happiness, moonlight and love, calypso melodies, hard liquor and what-will-you; many have found, too, that it sometimes pays to watch your step even in a natural paradise. Viola Steyning had run into perhaps too much trouble there. Young, wayward, too well endowed with money and good looks, Viola was the sort of girl to cause her mother back home in England a certain anxiety. That was why Julian Isles was sent out by Johnny Vallon of Chennault Investigations, famous detective agency, to bring her back alive. Love and laughter may be the superficial attributes of Dark Bahama, but beneath the tranquil surface of tropical beauty lurk sinister and dangerous undercurrents.

Here is a first-rate Peter Cheyney story in a new and attractive setting, a story at once absorbing in its many facets, moving swiftly from the sunny gaiety of exuberant life to the stark vision of sudden death in the tropical twilight. Here are the inimitable Cheyney characters, Quayle, Johnny Vallon, Ernest Guelvada and the rest, sweeping you along irresistibly on a wave of incomparable story-telling.