Emma Betony was content to live out her remaining years in a home for decayed gentlewomen when she receives an urgent appeal for help from a former student. Grace Aram is running Makeways, a struggling boarding girl for girls, newly relocated in a former nursing home in Dorset far from the falling German bombs. But Grace isn’t interested in Miss Betony’s teaching skills. She needs someone she can trust to expose the culprit behind a series of troubling events, including the possible poisoning of one of the two remaining nursing patients. What Miss Betony finds is an overwhelming sense of fear on the part of the Makeways’ inhabitants. Miss Betony follows a series of clues that eventually lead her to The Great Ambrosio, a charismatic, extremely handsome fortune teller with more than one trick up his sleeve. First published in 1941, Fear and Miss Betony marks the final appearance of Inspector Dan Pardoe. But it is Miss Betony herself who fights through fear and solves the case. Contemporary critics immediately proclaimed the book an instant classic, with two-time Edgar-winning critic James Sandoe including the book in his Readers’ Guide to Crime (1944), one of the earliest—and most astute—lists of the best books in the genre. The Golden Age of Detection (1913-1953) was known for its elaborate plots but Bowers may well have produced one of the most original and ingenious plots in the history of the genre in Fear and Miss Betony.

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