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FICTION: Masterson

"Masterson"*

Here is a novel-reader's novel, splashed with color, with consummate skill laid on. It begins in Abyssinia in afternoons hibiscus-red, rose-pink, iris-purple; in twilights of sapphire-matrix, gold lacquer, saffron fire, blood-scarlet; in sepia shadows of moonlight and, far and far away, star-spangled indigo of the lower sky. There, in a barbaric dawn, John Masterson, a normal middle-aged Englishman, ponders the news that he is heir to a fortune. Only a prayer-got sense of duty persuades him to accept it. Returning to London, he finds his fortune...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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