From the jacket

All right, so tigers don't live in Africa. How can you explain Benita Dustin's terrifying experience with one in the garden of her aunt's house in Cape Town?

Of course, this daughter of a journalist has considerable imagination, the kind you'd expect of a girl who likes to read and aspires to authorship herself. It's not the kind of imagination Joel Monroe appreciates. He's a fact-loving soul, the last boy on earth probably to believe in ghosts or in disappearing faces at the window, or to feel there's anything odd in a man's thumb being blue.

He's the last boy, certainly, whom Benita wants as companion on the trip she and her younger brother have made with their father, who is writing a book about South Africa. Oh, once in a while Benita and the guest, son of Mr. Dustin's editor back in Now York, do see eye to eye -- on the ugly injustice of apartheid, for instance. But when it comes to Aunt Persis' exciting house with its cave and romantic towers and frightening prowlers, or to the mystery surrounding the death of Aunt Persis' adopted son, why, then, the sparks fly. Logical Joel scoffs at the "notions " of imaginative Benita.

He scoffs on the other side of his face, so to speak, when her writer's intuition turns out to be only too true concerning the sinister intentions of Mr. Blue Thumb, other-wise known in questionable quarters as Tom Kettle -- a grinning, greasy-haired, sidling sailor whom sensible Joel wants to befriend!

Friendship, though, friendship, trust, and respect are the clues to the really big secret in this book. Here, against the breath-taking background of a highly dramatic country, is a story full of drama as well as of meaning, with scarcely a slack in the sleuthing thrills young mystery fans love.

Jacket and text illustrations by Richard Horowitz

Copyright 1961
THE WESTMINSTER PRESS Philadelphia

Library of Congress Card Catalog No. 61-10955

ISBN: N/A