Anne Morice's latest crime novel takes the form of a classical detective story, ingenious, complex and witty. The setting is traditional, a large Victorian rectory in the Thames Valley, but the characters involved and subsequent sinister events are very far from the ordinary or the conventional.

A famous opera singer dies at the age of eighty-two; she has been ill for some time and there would appear to be no reason to suspect that her death is anything other than natural. But her will, signed on the day she died, causes both astonishment and considerable ill-feeling among her family, and then two more deaths occur at the Rectory.

Tessa Price, the actress-narrator of Anne Morice's previous novels, is an old friend of the family and finds herself involved in an investigation of her own while her husband is dealing with a case nearby for Scotland Yard. Tessa's imagination and powers of deduction are as brilliant as ever, but in the end she nevertheless has to acknowledge the more stolid help of a member of the local police.