A man vanishes from a Norfolk inn between the fish and the entrée, leaving a hundred thousand pounds and a mission from an American millionaire undelivered — and the guests who watched him go have their own reasons for it. Oppenheim wrote some hundred and fifteen thrillers and invented the international-intrigue novel as a form; this 1914 one is the clean machine, and the Norfolk coast in it is genuinely cold. Sixty plates of fishing boats, harbors and cold northern light by painters such as Winslow Homer and Henry Scott Tuke run through the book, matching its salt air and quiet menace.
