CLOSED CIRCLE

Then tables are turned with a vengeance when two con men try to turn a 1931 shipboard romance into a spot of genteel blackmail—only to find the family that they've targeted single-handedly started WW I. Originally jealous of his old friend Max Wingate's amatory success with heiress Diana Charmwood, Guy Horton recoils in amazement when Max announces that he's too much in love with the lady to let her fearsome father, investment mogul Fabian Charmwood, buy him off—and then recoils in horror when Max's elopement with Diana, the details to which Guy had sold Charmwood, is interrupted by the appearance of the great man's corpse, sending Max into hiding and Guy determined to clear his name. Max will turn up again, but only as Guy and Diana are lying in each other's grief-stricken arms in Venice, where a group of Charmwood's creditors, who can't believe the news that his vast empire is worthless, have commissioned Guy to pry the whereabouts of his hidden assets out of Diana and her Aunt Vita. But the worst, as usual with Goddard, is still to come: scruffy journalist George Duggan tells a wild tale linking Charmwood—via an unholy cabal of investors calling themselves the Concentric Alliance—to a plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand in order to make the world safe for the armaments they've been investing in. Though Guy's story has lost every shred of plausibility by now, the continuing refrain of threat and counterthreat (will the Concentric Alliance be able to silence Guy before he's able to publish the damning evidence against them? whom can he trust in his flight from the perilous circle? and will he ever learn not to trust the sleek Diana?) will still keep you up much later than it should. High-toned, preposterous romantic period suspense from an old pro (Hand in Glove, 1993; A Debt of Dishonour, 1992, etc.).