From Perry Mason-creator Erle Stanley Gardner comes a lost classic of detective fiction featuring private eyes Donald Lam (once played by Frank Sinatra!) and Bertha Cool.

Cool & Lam are back, in the case Raymond Chandler called "about the best of the series since the first two...perhaps since the very first." Hired to prevent a poisoning that hasn't happened yet, Donald Lam tries playing mind games with a prospective killer, only to wind up with two poisonings to solve - and two dangerous femme fatales, not to mention an adulterous dentist, a questionable real estate scheme, and a scientific system for betting the horses that someone might kill to keep secret...

One of the best-selling authors of all time, Erle Stanley Gardner's greatest creations include crusading attorney Perry Mason (star of more than eighty novels, a TV series and TV movies) and the hardboiled detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, who appeared in more than two dozen adventures. An attorney himself, Gardner also founded the Court of Last Resort, a group that investigated criminal cases they believed had ended in wrong convictions.