It featured his popular character A. J. Raffles a well-known cricketer and gentleman thief.

[2] Unlike the three previous works, the book was a full-length novel and featured darker elements than the earlier collections of short stories.

He encounters Dan Levy, an unscrupulous moneylender, who manages to entrap a number of young men, mostly sons of the wealthy, by giving them loans and then charging huge amounts of interest.

However there was great popular demand for the return of the character, and a number of generous publishing offers, and Hornung agreed to write another book.

In this he has been compared to Arthur Conan Doyle's decision to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after disposing of the character in "The Final Problem"; however, unlike Doyle's revelation that Holmes had actually survived the plunge over Reichenbach Falls, Hornung set Mr. Justice Raffles before the events of the Boer War.

The comparison between the resurrections of Holmes and Raffles is made interesting by the fact that Doyle and Hornung were brothers-in-law.

Its reception was mixed, with some fans lamenting the loss of the carefree gentlemen thief of the early stories.

After an absence of three weeks, Raffles tells Bunny he has been taking the cure at Carlsbad as an excuse to try to steal jewelry from the wife of moneylender Dan Levy (whom Bunny calls Mr. Shylock), but returned early to watch his young cricket protégé, Teddy Garland, play at Lord's.

Levy suspects it was Raffles who stole (and then gave back) his wife's jewelry.

Raffles agrees to, on the additional condition that Levy forgive Mr. Garland's remaining interest payments.

Raffles recovers, and he and Bunny drag Levy, via a canoe on the nearby river, to an empty house's tower.

At a station, they encounter Mackenzie, who informs them that Levy was murdered by an unrelated debtor.

Several years later, Bunny, now Raffles's biographer of ruined reputation, runs into Teddy at a Turkish bath.