A thorough treatise on different ways people have tried to defraud life insurance companies, with many entertaining examples. The present . . . volume is . . . commended as a trustworthy record to those for whose use and reference it is primarily intended—life insurance companies and agents, medical examiners, insurance lawyers, and medico-legal experts. . . . [It] is not confined to the exposure of the cunning contrivances and artifices of this class of schemers and plotters; it includes picturesque views of detection and punishment; of the determined efforts of the companies, at whatever cost, to run them down; of the machinery of courts of justice; of the gloom of the prison cell; of the dark outlines of the scaffold. The cases in this book are for the most part more suggestive or instructive to detective agencies than to conspirators. . . . These narratives also show that no community has a monopoly of the piratical adventurers who thus prey upon beneficent institutions. They are of all nationalities as well as of both sexes, and everywhere alike "to no code or creed confined." - Summary by TriciaG and from the Preface