THE SHOALS OF HONOUR Basil Hazeltine has learned to live by his wits. As elegant and educated as he is, his only real talent lies in survival. He relies on his friends and relatives to supply him with spending money. Hazeltine himself has no interest in earning a living. His lack of ambition has already lost him the love of his life, Jocelyn, to his cousin Lewis Martinsburgh. Now Martinsburgh wants him to help him out with a young lady who holds some rather compromising letters he wrote her. It's all spending cash to Hazeltine. He is happy to help his volatile cousin. But Hazeltine has to make a decision. He can't go on like this forever. So when Miss Huested, an older woman with a small fortune, comes to him with a proposal of marriage, he is faced with a dilemma-whether to maintain his self-respect and steer clear of the shoals of honor, or live a life of compromise and expediency. And then Jocelyn comes back into his life... The Shoals of Honour is a story of New York City in the mid-1920s, filled with the contrary characters that Holding wrote about so well in her many mystery novels. Also included are six short stories from this period from the pages of The Century and Munsey Magazines .