The Woman in Red (novel)
The Woman in Red is a 1941 mystery thriller novel by Anthony Gilbert, the pen name of British writer Lucy Beatrice Malleson. It is the ninth in her series featuring the London solicitor Arthur Crook, one of the more unscrupulous characters of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. It was first published by the Collins Crime Club. Synopsis During early 1940 twenty three year old Julia Ross is unemployed and without money living in a cheap boarding house. She is also recovering from being spurned by her lover. Desperate she accepts an unpromising job as a secretary to an odd red-clad lady she meets in a gloomy house in Mayfair, attended by sinister servants. Asked as a condition of the job that she has no ties, the long-orphaned Julia says she has not. In fact this is not entirely true, as she has befriended a young man Colin who she has met in Lyons Tea Shop. Although he has told her of a fiancee in Ireland. Once in the house, Julia objects to her employer's plan to leave London immediately and finds herself held as a virtual prisoner. She is drugged and her plans to leave early in the morning