Book description
At ten, David Shaw, a silent and observant little boy already fluent in
half a dozen languages, was being dragged through the capitals of Europe
by a diplomat father and a beautiful scatterbrained mother. At twenty,
in the midst of the troubled 1960s, David abruptly disappeared from his
Ivy League college - to be reborn as Jan Van Zee, amiable Dutch drifter,
making his way around Europe and working as an occasional courier for a
syndicate of smugglers. At thirty he is cruelly betrayed and left for
dead by the syndicate, and now lives only for revenge against an
apparently all-powerful and invulnerable foe. Reverting to his true
identity, David returns to America to claim his vast inheritance, and
sets out to execute a consummate vengeance against each of the
syndicate's three bosses Stanley Ellin was born in Brooklyn, New York,
and educated at Brooklyn College. He worked as a teacher, a steelworker
and a dairy farmer and served in the US Army in World War Two before
becoming a full-time writer in 1946. His first published short story,
The Speciality of the House
, won him a special Ellery Queen Award. He won two Edgar Awards for
short stories, as well as one for The Eighth Circle
, and the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière for Mirror, Mirror
on the Wall
. In 1980 he was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America.
