THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

Not, strictly speaking, a murder-mystery, though there is a murder and there is a mystery. The real villain is Dame Gossip, as she makes herself busy with the name and fame of a bride, whose beauty baffles the fellow mill workers who cannot see how Jim got her, and causes suspicion and resentment in female hearts. A man is killed. The mill operatives, the executives, all wish to turn suspicion away from the instigators of unrest in a struggle for a new union set-up, and ""the beautiful stranger"" is the scapegoat. The solution is left to the reader's imagination-as it is to the conscience of those who guess the identity of the murderer, and the authorities presumably pigeonhole the case as ""Unsolved"". Interesting as a cross sectioning of a mill town, near San Francisco.