Margaret Millar: Spider Webs (USA 1988)

From the Publisher:
THE 25th NOVEL BY AMERICA'S GREATEST LIVING CRIME WRITER
"Margaret Millar, that doyenne of mystery writers, is at her very best... a taut, tricky, suspenseful account of a murder trial... the characters themselves are almost more brilliant than the story." -- Antonia Fraser, London Daily News

Margaret Millar: Spider Webs. International Polygonics, Library of Crime Classics, ISBN: 0930330765 (May, 1988), 323 p., $5.95.

Margaret Millar: Spider Webs (USA 1986)

From the Publisher:
In Santa Felicia County, California, Cully Paul King, the attractive Caribbean captain of a private yacht -- a black man, a ladies' man -- is on trial for first-degree murder. Madeline Pherson, a married woman whose body was found in the ocean, wrapped in kelp, was last seen on Cully's boat, Bewitched. Cully is accused of killing her for her jewelry, which she kept in a green box that has mysteriously disappeared.

But just as perplexing as the circumstances of Pherson's death are the motives of the people involved in Cully's trial. Cully's lawyer, Charles Donnelly, has volunteered to become the defense counsel -- for no fee. Eva Foster, the feminist court clerk, takes an unusual interest in the case. Harry and Richie Arnold, a father and son who were Cully's crewmen, have vastly different stories to tell about the accused. All these characters are caught in webs of suspicions, secrets, and hidden passions, as are the crotchety old Judge Hazeltine and Oliver Owen, the racist district attorney.

Intermingled with the court proceedings are scenes from the private lives of the people involved in the trial. Eva Foster, combining her work as court clerk with falling in love with the defendant, defense counsel Donnelly, trying to cope with a life and a wife he despises; the remand crewman, Richie, convincing himself that Cully is his real father; and Cully himself presenting two faces to the world. Was he a promiscuous man with a violent temper when drunk? Or was he a hardworking innocent man drawn into someone else's tragedy? As expert testimony worsens the case against Cully, it merely strengthens the opinion of his own lawyer, Donnelly, and the judge, Hazeltine, that he is guilty. Free-spirited Cully is not sure what would be worse, to be sent to prison or to be acquitted to face the demands of all the people who want something from him, people to whom he wishes to give nothing in return.

Margaret Millar has been attending murder trials as a court watcher for forty years, but this is the first book she has written about a trial. Although entirely fictional, Spider Webs has all the elements of an actual trial -- tragedy, comedy, and the suspense caused by the unpredictable behavior of human beings under stress.

Over the course of more than four decades and some two dozen titles, Margaret Millar has held hundreds of thousands of readers both here and abroad enthralled by the ingenuity of her storytelling. From her classic Beast in View, an Edgar Award winner as best mystery of its year, to her more recent winning of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, Millar has received countless honors, including being named a Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1965. The widow of Kenneth Millar, better known under his pen name of Ross Macdonald, she lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Margaret Millar: Spider Webs. A novel by the author of BANSHEE. William Morrow & Company, ISBN: 0688065937 (May, 1988), 323 p., $16.95.