The Saga of the Risen Phoenix Norma Goold was the most beautiful corpse Allen Starke had ever beheld. When he had seen her, lithe and young and magnetically compelling, doing her number at The Gayety burlesque house a few hours previously, he had understood his friend Paul Cloud's infatuation with her. And even in death the power she had over men continued. Paul Cloud, and his whole family with him, was drawn into the net of suspicion spread as a result of Norma's violent demise. So was Paul's fiancée, and the playboy backer of The Gayety, and an Italian gambler who had known La Goold when her name had been plain Marcella Cadorna. And before it all ended, Allen wished he had never left Kentucky's peaceful blue grass for New Orleans. —Jacket blurb for Death for the Lady, by Stewart Vanderveer, Phoenix Press Once upon a time, in the kingdom of New York, there was a publishing company called Phoenix Press. Like many others born during the Great Depression, Phoenix was a lending-library publisher, which is to say that it grew up in a very tough and competitive neighborhood and was often forced to fight for survival with other lending-library publishers—Godwin, Greenberg, Arcadia—that operated in the same ghetto.
