Leave Her to Heaven
By
IT IS hard to imagine anyone more selfish or cruelly possessive than Ellen Harland, the heroine of Mr. Williams’s new novel. She is as venomous and ensnaring as a black-widow spider. “I will never let you go,” whispered Ellen to Richard as she was seducing him into marriage. And thus began for Ellen the insidious struggle for the exclusive rights to this man’s love and interest — and for Richard began dreadful, tempest nous years, filled with a strange devotion that held a strong admixture of hate.
The plot is everything in this novel — and it is a humdinger. It has all the high suspense of a first-rate mystery story, and to disclose the content or sequence of the chilling scenes would be unpardonable. It must suffice here to present the stuff of which the yarn is woven: Richard Harland, young Bostonian novelist, virile, straightforward: Ellen Harland, his wife, whose avowed desire was to monopolize any thing or person she set her eye on; Danny Harland, victim of infantile paralysis and the hero-worshiping younger brother of Richard, who was devoted to him: Ruth, the adopted sister of Ellon, and as unlike her as anyone could be; Pettingill, a shrewd and likable Maine lawyer whose job it was to get an acquittal for his client, the defendant in one of the more amazing legal eases in fiction.
Once the skillful Mr. Williams has your interest in his grasp, you are caught, for the night. The ingenious and fantastically contrived tale moves before a background of nature which varies its moods with the moods of the story, providing floods, forest fires, and at last, when peace descends on these tormented beings, a calm, beneficent countryside. Houghton Mifflin, $2.50.
LT. (j.g.) ROBERT W. ANDERSON