Like all the Edgar Wallace books I've read so far, this one has a rather convoluted plot and lots of characters who flit in and out of the story. Still it's a good read when one isn't up for more heady things. I'd likely score it a ***+, were I able to give +s or -s.

This one involves revenge. Abel Bellamy is a very rich, very nasty American who has settled at Garre Castle in England. The castle has dungeons, secret passages, gun loops, all the fine features of a medieval castle. He is slowly working out his revenge on a number of people he feels wronged him. Most prominent is Elaine Held, his brother's spouse who wouldn't leave his brother to marry him, nor would she have him after his brother died. Then there's his nephew, who would be an enemy except he appears to have been lost in the war (WWI). The nephew bequeathed his inheritance to one John Wood, an eccentric American who has founded an orphanage in Belgium and who proposes to found another in England. In fact, he deems Garre Castle as the perfect spot. Then there's Valerie Howett, a most beautiful and charming young woman who, after spending oodles of her adoptive father's money, looking for her birth mother, figures out that Abel Bellamy holds the key to that mystery. So she and her father rent the "Ladies Cottage" adjacent to the castle. Of course, there's a secret passage connecting the two.

Well, we have other folks, like the nosey reporter, Spike Holland, and the suave police Jim Featherstone, and Bellamy's sinister "secretary", Julius Savini. But most important of all is the mysterious green archer. There has been a legend about a green archer of Garre Castle since the middle ages. Suddenly, after Bellamy takes up residence, people speak again of seeing a green archer about Garre Castle. Bellamy locks his doors tightly and obtains savage dogs to prowl the gardens and hallways, but the presence of the green archer still is felt. Some days he wakes up to find all the doors unlocked and his bedroom door open. He gets more vicious dogs, and one of them ends up being shot through the heart by a green arrow. Somewhere along the way, perhaps before his dog is lost, one of his henchmen is found out in the garden, shot through the heart with a green arrow.

Anyway things wander around here and there, and eventually we come to some surprising conclusions, which it would be remiss of me to reveal. So I won't. Suffice to say, for ordinary reading that isn't overly taxing, this book is one rather GoodRead.
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With a murderer who dresses in Green to follow a legend, a girl with a past, a policeman with a pretty face and several other entertaining characters this was a fun read. ( )