Two green stones out of a Russian church, a grand duke's daughter hiding in a New York boarding house, and a Bolshevik agent with a scarred hand hunting both. MacGrath was a Syracuse newspaperman who became one of the best-paid novelists of his day and among the first to write seriously for the screen; this 1920 thriller catches the Red Scare while it was still going on, and it moves. Fifty-five plates by painters including John Sloan and George Bellows carry the New York streets, tenements and subways of the period alongside the story.
