An amazing book told from the close third-person point of view of a serial killer written some three decades before that phrase entered the language. A former airman in Los Angeles looks up an old friend and is both disturbed and thrilled to find he's a detective and is working on the case of the stranger who is killing women and leaving no trace - not aware that the man he's seeking is his old friend Dix. It's very Dostoevskian in tone, claustrophobic and tortured. Amazing that a woman wrote this in 1948.