[In the following review, the critic praises Wallace's inventiveness in portraying a female villain in The Angel of Terror.]

The author of [The Angel of Terror] has devised something new in fiction. He has reversed all the conventional methods of dealing with pretty girls and presents us with a heroine—or, to be accurate, a co-heroine—who is something very different in the heroine line. She is exquisitely beautiful, but her beauty is, indeed, only skin deep and it camouflages more sublimated essence of Satan than could be condensed out of a thousand ordinary heroines. Mr. Wallace's originality has gone even further than the usual endeavors of fiction writers to provide something a bit wicked in their feminine creations, for they are usually content to allow their wicked women to be bad merely in the way of getting what they want by exploiting their sex. But Mr. Wallace's Jean Briggerland is very proper in her behavior toward men. She is a thoroughgoing criminal, well endowed with intelligence and using it all for criminal purposes. She is quite devoid of all ethical sense and her standard of judgment for her actions is whether they enable her to succeed in some criminal enterprise.

At the beginning of the story a man who has been somewhat attentive to her is shot and killed at her doorway and another man, her cousin and fiancé, is arrested for the crime. Her testimony at the trial convicts him, although he denies the truth of what she says. His lawyers succeed in a hazardous scheme of getting him out of custody long enough to marry him to a very nice girl who sees him only through the few moments of the wedding ceremony. Almost immediately afterward he is found dead in the garden, supposedly a suicide, but clutching the revolver in his right hand, while the shot is in his left temple. It develops that the lovely devil and her father would have inherited his fortune if he had not married and would still be his heirs if his widowed bride should die. As the lovely devil has won the widowed bride's confidence and sympathy, her lawyers, who know the beautiful girl's real character, have need for all their resources and ingenuity to prevent her from cutting short the earthly career of the unsuspecting young woman. Mr. Wallace has endowed his Jean Briggerland with a fertile imagination in contriving unusual and natural-looking means of death and he leads the reader through an exciting maze of events wherein Jean concocts one scheme after another, only to find herself foiled in the outcome. The story, of course, is of the wholly artificial variety, with no pretense of presenting a mirror of life, but it is well made and well told, it is ingenious in its freshening up of the materials which go into most stories of crime, and for people who like novels of that kind it will provide a very entertaining hour.