This is the novel Kenneth Fearing wrote right after his famous thriller, The Big Clock. The protagonist, Ellen Vaughan, is the inheritor of a huge recording library, part of a project her deceased father envisioned as being "a continental network offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject . . ." Sound familiar? Yes, in 1952 this was an intriguing foreshadowing of the Internet. More pertinent to Ellen is the fact that it contains a secret which someone wants to get at before she does.