The long-awaited sequel to Desire and Helen, this work picks up where the first volume left off, presenting us with private investigator Anthony Harvest, a detective with a penchant for the sexual life, and a gift for handling tough situations.

Henry meets up with Helen's former companion, and in time is sent into North Africa searching for the lost woman, whose diaries so inflamed the imaginations of us all.

Excerpt:

"How do you expect me to be interested in another woman at this moment?" I answered with a smile."

"If you knew Helen you'd soon cool down," Nadya said drily.

She took a sip of her coffee and continued: "And if you don't listen, you'll never have a chance of seeing her. She may be being murdered at this very moment."

"All right," I said in a resigned tone of voice, "you tell me. Who exactly is Helen Seferis?"

"She is a friend of my father's," Nadya said, and more quietly, "my friend too. I fell in love with a young American on the boat coming from Bombay and Helen ran off with him at Marseilles."

"I thought you said she was a friend of yours!"

"She is. She knew my father wouldn't approve of Devlin. She thought I might do something silly, like getting married to him. So she eloped with him herself and took him to Monte Carlo."

"And now they're in Algeria?"

"She is, but he isn't. He's dead. He lost all his money in Monte Carlo and committed suicide. After that, Helen was kidnapped by an Arab and sold, I think to a brothel, and that's all we know."

"Where did you get your information?"

"Her diary was found. I've brought a copy of it along with me. You must read it, and then you must go and find her."

"Do the French police know?"

"It was they who passed on the information. They cant find her and my father has had a firm of private detectives in Algeria for more than three months. I had a letter from him last week. He has decided to give up the search."

"And you want me to have a shot at it?"

"I'll pay you what you ask."

"I can't promise. I have a lot of work here. You'd better let me take a look at the diary."

She passed over a typed manuscript of two hundred or more pages. I was somewhat put out by its length.

"It's more like a book," I said. "What is it, her life story?"

"Read it and see," said Nadya with a smile.

I looked at my watch.

"I'll go to my club," I said. "I'll meet you back here in the cocktail bar at five."

"You'll give me your decision then?"

"If possible. But you must remember, Nadya, that a great number of people have been looking for her for a long time already. The scent is almost dead. Even if I decide to go, I may not succeed."

"I think you will," Nadya replied. "Sometimes I can't understand myself. You're the first man who has really interested me since Devlin, and now I'm sending you away, and to Helen of all people!"

"What do you think I am, a conditioned reflex!"

"You won't want to be anything else when you see Helen," said Nadya in her husky voice.

I sat back in the reading room of my club near St. James Place. On my knees lay the manuscript, still unopened. Frankly, told without detail, the story sounded phony. The white slave racket is a dangerous one and the slavers don't go out of their way to choose the female acquaintances of important men like Mr. Pamandari. I gathered from Grisskillin's concern about Nadya that Mr. Pamandari was the kind of man who made and unseated governments. If you're a wise criminal, you don't upset men like that. If necessary, they'll start a war to have your skin. No. The usual cargo was a cargo of minnows: waitresses, pantry maids, girls who come up from the country to find 'exciting' employment, neurotic women who will marry strange men in strange towns and fly by night without a word to their acquaintances.

That was point number one. This is my usual procedure. I approach all my problems in this way. I like to get a general picture before I lose myself in a morass of relevant and irrelevant details.

Secondly, it seemed to me damned strange to say the least of it that the French police, who are experts in these kinds of things, had been unable to locate the missing woman's whereabouts.

Thirdly, any firm of private detectives employed by a man like Mr. Pamandari would be experts, would be assured from the beginning of all the help that the police could give them, and were unlikely to come up with something after three month's investigation.

Thus, my attitude as I opened the manuscript was one of polite disbelief.

It began with a letter from one French officer to another which reported the abduction of Miss Seferis by a Sheikh X, and of the discovery of the manuscript (the diary) on the person of an Arab arrested in connection with a theft.

The Sheikh was an important man in French Algeria. That would account for the difficulty of the search.

I read the letter quickly, turned the page, and was at once caught up in the hothouse quality of the woman's prose:

"It is dark where I am lying, alone, in a tent, on a few sheepskins that they provided for me. They have taken my clothes away from me and have given me the clothes of an Arab woman..."

It was a quarter to five when I finally closed the folder. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I would go to Algeria. The woman who was created in the pages of the diary, rising like a pale flower out of a nightmare, had captivated me. I realized then that from the day I read the manuscript, until the day I would hold her in my arms, my life could have only one purpose. Compared to Helen Seferis, Nadya was merely a wonderfully sensual child, and Laura, whom, in spite of our quarrels, I had still suspected I would marry, became a civilized creature whose primal nature was lost, irrevocably, beneath the veneer of manners which she had cultivated in the face of social life.

And yet I had no idea what she looked like!

She was blonde according to Nadya. Her own descriptions of herself in the diary required confirmation—long white flanks, the breasts of a goddess, the belly and sex of an enchantress.

I stubbed my cigarette, put the manuscript carefully in my briefcase, and took a taxi to meet Nadya.