Notes

Summary: It's May 1910 and 16 year old Linda Duke has just received a strange message: a playing card, the Jack of Spades, in an envelope that was sent from Paris, where her widowed father, Professor Charles Duke, a noted but impractical Shakespearean scholar, has gone on a research trip. In the code devised by her late French mother Madeleine, who was a dedicated card-player, 'Jack of Spades' means treachery and danger. Her father knows that. But it is not his handwriting on the envelope. Linda is convinced he is in great danger, and being both brave and determined, decides to set out immediately to Paris to look for him. In Paris she begins to unravel the secret of her father's disappearance, she begins to realise that there are even more secrets than she has realised. Who are the people following her? What was her father really doing in Paris? Can it be that he isn't just the mild-mannered professor he seems to be? Who sent the message to her? Who can she really trust? Linda begins to understand that she has stumbled into a daring, deadly plot, and that time is fast running out -- for her father, herself, her friends -- and the future of France and the rest of the world. And that it is up to her now to stop the conspiracy, in a world where treachery and betrayal seem to reign supreme