Mr. Oppenheim has never written a more absorbing story than this one, in which an adventurous young American first falls in love, then into trouble, and becomes a part of events that are making history.
In Monte Carlo three men skilled in international intrigue meet in secret conference; two Ministers of foreign affairs and a Grand Duke plan to make over the map of Europe, while a diplomat representing a fourth great world-power, aided by skilled secret-service men, aims to thwart their endeavours. Then—enter the American. How young Richard Lane, wealthy and used to having his own way, fell in love with mysterious Mr. Grex's daughter, how he was not discouraged even when he found out what an important personage Mr. Grex really was, how he took a hand in events and caused an upset, is told in a thrilling love story that lays bare the methods of modern international diplomatists and incidentally conveys a warning to America to arm herself against the possibilities of war.
THE EVIL DAY. By Lady Troubridge.
In this book Lady Troubridge abandons for the first time the study of the very young girl, to give us one of a woman of forty, who, until the story opens, has led a quiet, retired and domestic existence. Circumstances, however, bring the heroine face to face with modern life and its developments in their most vivid form, and she does not pass through the experience altogether unscathed.
THE SECRET SON. By Mrs. Henry Dudeney.
Mrs. Henry Dudeney's new novel is a delightful story of the Sussex Downs. Its types and characters are rustic, and in it comedy and tragedy are skilfully mingled by this most accomplished writer. The theme of the book is the relation between mother and son, and the reader passes to the close of a very human story with a most absorbing interest.
DEMI-ROYAL. By Ashton Hilliers, Author of 'The Adventures of a Lady of Quality.'
That the famous Mrs. Fitzherbert, legal and loyal wife of the Regent, may have borne him a child is indisputable. That she did so is the author's thesis in this diverting romance; and the fortunes of this child, legitimate, but un-royal, trepanned, lost, mourned as dead, repudiated, traced, acknowledged, are his theme. The mother-love of a noble woman, the fears of a selfish voluptuary, the self-sacrifice of honest York, form the warp across which runs the woof of a girl's life lived innocently and spiritedly in Puritan surroundings, watched over by the Order of Jesus, the unconscious centre of vehement antagonisms.
SOMETHING NEW. By P. G. Wodehouse, Author of 'The Little Nugget.'
The treatment of this story is farcical, but all the characters are drawn carefully as if it were a comedy. Ashe Marson, a struggling writer of adventure stories, sees an advertisement in a paper in which 'a young man of good appearance who is poor and reckless, is needed for a delicate and perilous enterprise.' Joan Valentine, the heroine, who has been many things in her time, also answers an advertisement requiring 'a woman to conduct a delicate and perilous enterprise.'