Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith: Vanish in an Instant; Wives and Lovers; Beast in View; An Air That Kills; The Listening Walls

Five acclaimed novels from the Golden Age of Suspense, including the Edgar Award-Winning Novel Beast in View

Introduction by Tom Nolan

In 1950s America the men are back to work and the women are home raising a new generation. The war is over and the boom is on. Everyone is happy. It is to this myth of the perfect American family that novelist Margaret Millar applied her scalpel.

This volume includes five of Millar’s novels of the 1950s, among her best-known works of literary suspense as well as some of the most compulsively readable, please-leave-a-light-on thrillers ever put to paper.

VANISH IN AN INSTANT (1952)
In this classic noir tale of blurred guilt and flawed innocence, a cynical lawyer uncovers the desperate lives of a group connected only by a gruesome murder.

WIVES AND LOVERS (1954)
A sincere and compassionate novel about the complications of married life, and the love, loathing, pain, loyalty, disappointments and friendship that grow out of a marriage.

BEAST IN VIEW (1955) – Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel
Hailed as one of the greatest psychological mysteries ever written and winner of the 1956 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, Beast in View remains as freshly sinister today as the day it was first published.

AN AIR THAT KILLS (1957)
When Ron Galloway never arrives at a boys' weekend fishing retreat, it becomes increasingly clear that something terrible has befallen him. Was he a victim of his own lust? Or of someone else's greed?

THE LISTENING WALLS (1959)
In this suspenseful masterpiece about corrupted love, Rupert Kellogg's wife, Amy, goes missing after an ill-fated trip to Mexico—and Rupert becomes the focus of a paranoid investigation.