The Orange Divan, by Valentine Williams (Hardcover)

On a sweltering evening in a London slum, a strikingly beautiful young woman in fashionable attire collapses outside a secondhand shop—a knife plunged into her cheast. The terrified shopkeeper and a chemist witness the horror, but the identity of the victim remains a mystery, and no one saw the attacker.

Across town, a successful stockbroker returns home to an eerily silent house to find his beloved wife missing. Her evening clothes laid out, her tea taken hours ago at her club, she left and simply vanished. As the police and a newspaper editor begin to piece together her final movements, the two disturbing events start to intertwine, drawing the stockbroker into a shadowy world of secrets and deception.

Set against the glittering contrasts of Jazz Age London—from Mayfair’s elegant drawing rooms to the squalid streets of Earl’s Court—this vintage thriller weaves a web of passion, identity, and betrayal, where nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted.