Penny Nichols and the Black Imp

In 1936, a young woman named Penny Nichols made a decision that would trouble her conscience and sharpen her mind: she helped a friend evade the police. When sculptress Amy Coulter's masterpiece, the grotesque and compelling 'Black Imp,' loses an art contest to an obviously inferior work, Amy is devastated. Then a valuable Rembrandt vanishes from the gallery, and police immediately fix on Amy as their suspect. Penny believes in her friend's innocence and assists her in fleeing custody. But when Penny later spots Amy accepting money from a suspicious figure connected to the museum, she begins to wonder whether her faith was misplaced. What follows is a tightly wound mystery in which every clue seems to point two directions at once, and the truth about the Black Imp itself proves more astonishing than anyone imagined. Joan Clark constructs a puzzle that rewards careful attention, while her protagonist wrestles with questions of loyalty, justice, and whether helping someone truly means serving the right side of the law.