Peregrine Jay, owner of the Dolphin Theatre, is putting on a magnificent production of "Macbeth", the play that, superstition says, always brings bad luck. One night, the claymore swings and the dummy's head is more than real. Luckily, Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is in the audience.

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.

When Albert Campion is called by the fiancee of an old college friend to investigate the disappearance of her uncle, he little expects the mysterious spate of death and dangers that follows among the bizarre inhabitants of Socrates Close, Cambridge. He and Stanislaus Oates must tread carefully, and battle some family dynamics, to solve the case.