This novel was originally published in 1939 but despite being nearly eighty years the story holds up quite well.As the story opens Ellery and Inspector Queen are visited by the son of a former police colleague to Inspector Queen. The young man, Beau Rummel has bounced around the world having a variety of adventures but now would like to settle down to a steady job, well steadier than the jobs he had been working at. Beau was convinced that he would be an excellent private detective, well if he had the right business partner, one who could supply the necessary brains to Beau's abundant brawn. Fortunately Beau knew just the man for the job - Ellery. Eventually Beau managed to convince Ellery to go along with the scheme and their first case was an intriguing one, the client wrote the firm a generous retainer for perform a service sometime in the future but declined to specify just what the job would be. Some months later the exact nature of the job was revealed - two missing heiresses needed to be located in order to inherit a vast fortune, a very easy task considering the generous payment they had been paid. Unfortunately that was the last easy part of the assignment. Of course Ellery manages to sort out all of the complications most satisfactorily but there are enough twists and turns in the plot to make the chase interesting.The reader will need to keep in mind the age of this novel, identities were much easier to fake, DNA was unheard of, all of which makes Ellery's eventual triumph all the more remarkable.