The 120-Hour Clock

New York: Walker & Company, 1986. K6 - A first edition (complete numberline) hardcover book SIGNED by Francis M. Nevins on the title page in very good condition in very good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket and book have some bumped corners, light discoloration and shelf wear. A Walker Mystery. 8.75"x5.5", 214 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Milo Turner is a con man, and proud of his craft. With reason; he's just about the best. But the scam that changes his life is not one of his own - it has been concocted by the woman he loves. When it backfires and she is murdered, Milo embarks on the most daring and intricate scheme of his career, to find her killers and avenge her death. Milo and the lady first encounter each other when he is a young man starting out in "the life" and she is a child, the adopted daughter of Fred Schuyler, the King Fox of con men, and Milo's mentor. Seventeen years and countless successful false identities later, Milo meets her again. Now a beautiful young woman, she enlists his help in finding the hidden legacy old Fred has left her. They do find it, but because there is danger in their taking it, they part. More years go by, and then one evening on a Manhattan street they meet once more. She is passing herself off as Ann Haskell, the long-lost daughter of a midwestern supermarket tycoon who has just died; she expects to share in his substantial estate with his two sons of a later marriage. Before she can, and less than two days after her putative father's death, Ann herself dies. Milo knows, although the police do not, that she has been murdered. Wild with grief, he determines to track down her killer. Milo has resources, including access to the most skilled forger in the United States, the ability to take on an entirely new persona, and a valuable contact in Jock Schultz, a Barry Fitzgerald voice at the other end of the telephone and the man without whom half of the major scams of the past quarter century could not have been pulled off. Schultz runs a "people-emporium" that could furnish "the name of a forty-five-year-old-locomotive engineer of Serbo-Croatian ancestry who has lived in Keokuk, Iowa and is allergic to onion." And much more. Using these, a newly acquired knowledge of an obscure law, and all his ingenuity, Milo concocts his enormously clever scam to explore "Ann's" killers on the pretext of claiming her inheritance. The result is breathtaking suspense and a new hig in intricate and absorbing deceptions.. Signed by Author. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.