Cotton Kendall, son of a wealthy mill-owning family in Sudwich, Connecticut, had been the youthful protégé and friend of Frederick Thorne, distinguished artist. He—unless it was his hometown schoolmate and gunner—returned, disfigured beyond recognition, unwilling to be seen until plastic surgery had restored his face. Thorne is half convinced, half puzzled. So is the plastic surgeon with criminology as a hobby. And so is Lieutenant Dickerson of the Boston homicide bureau, when the town’s most eligible playboy bachelor is found shot to death in his car, and Dickerson is called upon to reconstruct the appearance and personality of the murderer. The artist’s model’s relations with the mill manager, the missing gunner and the local Fish King, the flyer’s young wife, who greets his ostensible return with mixed feelings, and the attempts to pull a fast business coup to do the old man out of his mills, add plenty of entanglements to challenge the reader, let alone the Boston homicide cop.
