Nero Wolfe had turned down a handsome fee from the President of Seaboard Products, and accepted a $1 retainer from Clara Fox, accused of stealing $30,000 from the corporation. No one, except maybe Wolfe, knew how he was going to come up with a fee from this case. And even Wolfe failed to foresee that he would take a bullet in his own substantial corpus in the course of the investigation. What was the mysterious "Rubber Band" whose reach extended over forty years and 5,000 miles to claim its victims?

Also released in a paperback edition as To Kill Again (1960), with misleading blurbs painting Clara Fox as a femme fatale.