At a lakeside town near the Imperial capital T'ang, China's master detective, Judge Dee finds his astounding powers of deduction put to their greatest challenge yet as he battles murder and high treason against the Imperial throne.

Appearance and reality are not always the same. Timothy Kinnit is rich, handsome and well-bred. He seems to have everything. Then, on the eve of his elopement, he learns that he was adopted, and he is desperate to know who he really is. Someone seems no less keen to stop him finding out.

Scandal hits the staid publishing house of Barnabas when one of the directors is found dead in the strong-room. Suspicion immediately falls on his wife's lover, the junior partner in the firm. But how does an unpublished Restoration comedy come to feature in the tragedy? And what of the odd disappearance of another director twenty years before?

Detective, Albert Campion goes into the eccentric Palinode household, where there have been two suspicious deaths. And, if poisoning were not enough, there are also anonymous letters, sudden violence and a vanishing coffin. Meanwhile, the Palinodes go about their nocturnal business and Campion dices with danger in his efforts to find the truth.

Campion is welcomed back from his three-year stint with the war office by a suspicious suicide case -- classic British crime writing at its best.