The Dead Beat

Anyone might have done what Walter and Elinor Harris did. Returning home from the Sunset Club, they an unconscious, good-looking, clean-cut young man on the back seat of their car with blood on his face. They put him to bed in their guest room. And when he twisted his ankle on their stairs the next morning, they invited him to stay until it got better. Larry Fox was affable, pleasant, even charming, and he told them so much about himself that they thought they knew him pretty well. But they didn't know him at all.

Larry had had a lot of practice fooling people. He'd been doing it as long as he could remember. Elinor and Walter were real squares; they believed everything he told them. And he was making it all up as he went along. None of it was within miles of the real truth.

LaVerne, the singer at the night club, could have told Walter and Elinor plenty. She knew a lot about Larry — but Larry knew far too much about her. A lot that she didn't want her husband or the cops to find out.

It was Jim Whittaker who first suspected Larry wasn't what he pretended to be, but it was only suspicion and perhaps he was imagining it because his teen-age daughter, Jill, liked Larry too much.

If Walter, Elinor, Jim, and Jill could have had even the smallest glimpse into Larry's mind or character they would have been scared — really scared. But no one knows what an unstable, dangerous person Larry is — except the reader, who has been scared right from the start and who can't do a thing to prevent the violence he sees coming.

The chills are expertly hand-tailored by that master of shock treatment, Robert Bloch — and don't say we didn't warn you!