I bought this book because I very much like many of Hoch's highly competent short stories, especially the "Nick Velvet" stories about a clever thief who only steals ostensibly worthless objects for a high fee, and those of Rand from Concealed Communications. . This story is more like a Rand tale because it focuses (like many of the short stories) on a single clue in the form of a message. Like many of his stories (and those of other writers of his era such as Ellery Queen, who published many Hoch stories in his magazine), the clue is a bizarre final message from a dying victim. In this case, the victim, TV newsman Ross Craigthorn, is shot by an ingenious guntube built into his microphone while he is accepting a "Raven" award from the Mystery Writers of America as 'mystery fan of the year" and the clue is that he deliberately smashes the raven award itself, so the question becomes how the raven is linked to his killer. The answer to this question is postponed by a rather feeble romance between Barney Hamet, a former detective turned mystery writer and VP of the MWA, who is assigned by the MWA to find the killer, and Susan Veldt, a reporter for Manhattan, a New York City-oriented magazine whose editor has assigned her to do a series of articles on awards given out in New York (the Emmies, Tonies etc.) and who is therefore covering the awards dinner. The story is told in alternating chapters from these two points of view, with occasional chapters from the point of view of the killer. The attempt at a female POV is not very convincing, and the romance simply does not strike the sparks that really effective mystery-romances do. The solution to the mystery is prepared credibly (especially for Graham Greene fans), but my overall feeling is that it could have been done more effectively as a short story without the romance. For fans of 50s mysteries, one bonus is that it does include a lot of (presumably) reliable information about how the MWA and its awards system worked at the time, and small cameo appearances by real mystery writers, including Rex Stout and half of Ellery Queen. ( )