The husband-wife writing team of Dorothy and Sidney Rosen spin another mystery yarn featuring Belle Appleman, a feisty Boston amateur detective and heroine of Death and Blintzes. It's the mid-1930s in Boston, and Beantown, like the rest of the nation, is deep in the Great Depression. Belle recently resigned her unionized job at a clothing manufacturing plant for a clerk job in a neighborhood drugstore owned by long-time friend Harry White. In the days when a nickel would get you an ice cream cone, the drug store was a popular gathering place.
Belle does just about everything except fill prescriptions.
Her detective instincts kick in when a young woman comes into the store, collapses and later dies in the hospital from complications of an abortion, a procedure that was illegal in those days. Belle finds her own life in danger as she becomes involved in seeking a cold-blooded killer who may or may not be a doctor. In the meantime, she is smitten by one of the Beacon Hill physicians, also a murder suspect. Belle, however, is not going to let either romance distract her from finding both the abortionist and the killer. Salzman, author of Iron and Silk and The Soloist, two best-selling nonfiction works, sets his novel in a Carmelite monastery near Los Angeles where life goes on today virtually unchanged from that of centuries ago.