Now a modern crime classic, Levin's story centers on a charming, intelligent man who will stop at nothing, even murder, to get where he wants to go.

Burton “Bud” Corliss is a young man with a ruthless drive to rise above his working-class origins to a life of wealth and importance.

He serves in the Pacific in World War II, and upon his honorable discharge in 1947 he learns that his father was killed in an automobile accident while he was overseas.

The most pivotal moment in his life occurs during the war, when he first wounds, then kills, a Japanese sniper, who is so terrified that he wets his pants and begs for mercy.

Corliss is elated by the total power he holds over the soldier; at the same time, he is disgusted by the man's display of abject terror.

Resolving to get rid of Dorothy, he tricks her into writing a letter that, to an unknowing observer, would look like a suicide note, and then throws her from the roof of a tall building.

He breaks into Corliss' childhood home and steals a written plan for meeting and seducing Marion to get her family's money.

Days before the wedding, he shows up at the Kingship family home and presents Marion and her father with the evidence of Corliss' deception.

When they refuse to believe his protestations of innocence, Corliss panics and wets his pants – just as the Japanese soldier, his symbol of pathetic cowardice, had done.

Horror author Stephen King called Levin’s first novel “a gritty suspense story told with great élan.” He describes the novel as unique in the sense that a key element of the story—a revelation about who committed a particular murder—takes the reader by complete surprise.