The China Governess: Volume 17

＂Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light. And she has another quality, not usually associated with crime stories, elegance.＂ --Agatha Christie

Timothy Kinnit is rich, handsome, and successful, but his past is a mystery to him. When he learns, on the eve of his elopement, that he is adopted, he must question everything he thought he knew.

In desperate search of answers, Kinnit calls on private detective Albert Campion to shed some light on his past, and how it connects him to the notorious Turk Street Mile slum. Meanwhile, his illustrious adopted family has a sinister secret of its own--involving a murderous nineteenth-century governess--that must also be brought to light by Campion’s investigations.

＂Allingham is very, very good and those who are not familiar with her have a discovery awaiting them.＂--Los Angeles Times

Margery Allingham, born in 1904 to Emily and Herbert Allingham, was an esteemed English novelist, author, and editor of Christian Globe and the New London Journal. Considered one of the four ＂Queens of Crime＂ from the golden age of detective fiction, Allingham began writing stories and plays at a young age and published her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, at 19. She later studied drama and speech training at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. Allingham is best known for her character Albert Campion, a sleuth first introduced in The Crime of Black Dudley. Campion was featured in seventeen subsequent novels, and even more short stories. Allingham continued to write until her death on June 30, 1966.