Sand and Satin

From the dust jacket:
A foggy night in London - the fog curling in eddies round buildings, masking the street-lamps and slowing the traffic to a crawl. The door of Dick Carteret's car opens suddenly and a girl climbs in without invitation. Carteret is interested - as any man would be - for here are both beauty and distress, and there is no mistaking either. They drive westward, but as they near Sloane Square the girl slips from the car as abruptly as she had come and disappears into the murk of the night. Almost immediately, Carteret is accosted by a man claiming to be a doctor in search of an escaped young woman mental patient - an unlikely story not made more probable by the presence of an ape-like bodyguard who accompanies the doctor. Intrigued, Carteret is at first evasive and, late elusive.
So opens Sax Rohmer's latest novel, a story of the exquisite, amoral Sumuru, the beauty of whose body drives men to commit the crimes of vice and violence on which her nature feeds.
As an evil genius of fiction, Sumuru is as compelling a character as Rohmer's other famous creation, Dr. Fu Manchu.