THE MAKE-BELIEVE MAN Norma Hovic is recently widowed and living with her 11-year-old son in her mother’s house. When her mother leaves to stay with Norma’s sister, who is expecting, Norma is at first pleased to have the house to herself. But then Cliff appears. Cliff had been her mother’s roomer until Norma came to live with her. She had heard all about Cliff. But the Cliff who shows up at her doorstep is another matter altogether. There is something not quite right here. This Cliff makes her nervous. His face is wounded and he keeps babbling about a man he had worked for who had humiliated him. He almost seems to resent Norma’s presence here. And that’s when he tells her that he wants to stay… A FRIEND OF MARY ROSE Mr. Nicholas is 83 and blind, living with his son and daughter-in-law in a neighborhood which has seen better days. In fact, today the family is moving. But Mr. Nicholas is afraid that his personal trunks will be left behind. So, after spending the day at Mrs. Thompson’s house next door while the movers are at work, he sneaks back into his house at night to make sure the movers took them. But he discovers instead a young girl being hunted in the attic by a drunken letch of a man. Mr. Nicholas has never paid much attention to his neighbors before. He has no idea who the young girl could be. All she tells him is that her name is Mary Rose. Now they are locked in a dark room together, being hunted by someone who is an even greater mystery… ”[She] can describe the best and worst of a character in one sentence, and can make a single gesture tell of years of accumulated pain or madness… Fenwick’s novels are all beautifully plotted in human intimacy.” --Carol Cleveland, Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers “Fine fearsome prowling… with warm understanding of its characters… and a firm, chilling insistence on the menace of the unpredictable mind at large.” --Anthony Boucher, New York Times “The whole book is absorbing, original, and beautifully written, and because Elizabeth Fenwick makes her people so real, it is not only a taut novel, but a deeply touching one.” --Dan Wickenden, author of The Running of the Deer Elizabeth Fenwick was born Elizabeth Jane Phillips on April 5, 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri. After high school, she wrote poetry and an unpublished first novel which she destroyed when it was rejected by a publisher. She then enrolled in secretarial courses and became a French translator for two years. She adopted the pseudonym E. P. Fenwick in the early 1940s and resumed writing, publishing three detective mysteries with Farrar & Rinehart. After turning to mainstream writing for ten years as Elizabeth Fenwick, she returned to writing crime fiction with the suspense novel Poor Harriet. Fenwick married noted harpsichord maker, David Jacques Way, in 1950, and continued to publish more suspense novels until 1973. She died from Alzheimer’s Disease on November 20, 1996.