Reprisals

It is early November, 1929. The stock market has crashed. The Roaring Twenties are about to end. But Cyrus Skeen, private detective, is not too concerned. He never bought on margin or gambled on "sure things" to make a quick buck; his wealth is secure. But many businessmen and investors, having grown reckless and thrown caution to the winds, made that mistake, and have been bankrupted. Ruined, some had committed suicide. As a sequel to The Chameleon, Gideon Knowles was the only member of the mini-Bund in Palo Alto to escape the authorities. But he returns, and works behind the scenes. In this thirty-second Skeen outing, Reprisals, set in San Francisco, Skeen encounters again Knowles and the foreign puppet-masters of the Maxey Nazi gang. They want vengeance on the man who exposed the agents of a nascent American Nazi Bund and got them jailed for the murder of Lucien Maxey, a local businessman who promised to expose the deception, betrayal, and fraud of his Nazi-converted wife and son. His murder was disguised as a stock market crash suicide.