[In the following review, Jerrold describes Williams's thriller The Dreadful Night.]

Mr. Ben Ames Williams has . . . provided us with a "thriller," but one of simpler and more customary kind as his title, The Dreadful Night, may be said to indicate. The setting is provided by a lake on the islets of which prosperous Bostonians have built themselves lordly pleasure houses for summer rustication. Molly Sockford has sent her children home to the city and is awaiting her husband, that they may close up for the winter. He is unaccountably delayed; she is joined by a girl friend and later by a newspaper man who comes with a tale of horrid tragedy from a neighbouring island, where he has been to interview a celebrated singer. And then the dreadfulness threatens them—for Mrs. Sockford possesses the sinister emerald! The author succeeds in imparting an appropriate sense of the eerie to a lively narrative.