Tread Lightly, Angel

Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., for The Crime Club. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1952. First Edition. Hardcover. [shelfwear to book along bottom edges and at upper extremities, pages lightly age-tanned; jacket shows wear at edges and corners, with a bit of paper loss near the top of the spine, a closed tear at the bottom edge of the front panel, and internal paper-tape reinforcement at both ends of spine]. New York-set mystery novel in which a private detective and his partner are hired by a famous artist to follow his daughter, "to discover the reason for her depression and unexplained wanderings," but soon find themselves unwitting witnesses to her suicide. Their subsequent attempt to uncover the motive for this desperate act brings "many unusual people" into the picture: "a beautiful career girl; an author of children's books and her too handsome illustrator; an elderly Romeo suspected of embezzlement; and a society doctor, apparently returned from the dead." The striking, quasi-surrealist jacket art is by the Russian-born artist Vera Bock (1905-2006). .