Helen Clarvoe is a reclusive young woman, terrified of the wider world outside the Hollywood residential hotel in which she lives. One day her safe but restricted life is dramatically changed when she receives an abusive telephone call from someone who claims to be an old school friend named Evelyn Merrick. Evelyn threatens her with crystal ball visions of a future in which a bleeding and mutilated Helen has suffered a terrible accident. Terrified, Helen reluctantly allows an old family friend, Paul Blackshear, to make efforts to track down the caller. As Blackshear investigates the lives of both Helen and her family and of Evelyn Merrick, he is drawn into a seedy world of extortion, drugs and pornography where little is what it seems and everyone has something to hide. Helen herself is forced to emerge from the seclusion in which she has lived and wrestle with the demons from her past.

Born in Canada, Margaret Millar spent her adult life in the USA, largely in California, and she was married to Kenneth Millar (better known, under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald, as the creator of the private eye Lew Archer). Her own career as a crime writer began in the early 1940s with a series of novels featuring a psychiatrist turned detective named Paul Prye and she was still publishing in the late 1980s. Spider Webs, which appeared in 1986, is a gripping, often satirical courtroom thriller with a devastating twist in its tail. Beast in View, much acclaimed on its first publication, has long been her most famous novel. Although the passage of time has made some of its depictions of Hollywood's underbelly seem almost quaintly restrained, Millar's narrative remains exceptionally powerful and, as it moves inexorably towards a final revelation that can still shock readers, it provides clear evidence of her skill and ingenuity as a writer.

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