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 But how does an unpublished Restoration comedy come to feature in the tragedy?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?
Campion returns from three years work for the War Office in Europe to find that Lugg, his manservant, has brought him an unusual gift: the black silk nightdress-clad body of a dead woman, an apparent suicide. Now, Campion must assist Detective Chief Inspector Oates and Superintendent Yeo in unravelling a tangled plot of deception and murder.
A British claim to a tiny Balkan state leads Campion on a race against time in the village of Pontisbright -- classic British crime writing at its best.
Meg Elginbrodde has believed herself to be a widow for five years. Yet since she announced her intention to remarry she has been recieving some very odd communications: photographs of her husband, Martin, looking very much alive. Why? Amateur detective Albert Campion tries to uncover the truth.
Campion's glorious summer in Pontisbright is blighted by death. Amidst the preparations for Minnie and Tonker Cassand's fabulous summer party, a murder is discovered and it falls to Campion to unravel the intricate web of motive, suspicion and deduction with all his imagination and skill.
Fact catches up with fiction when the secret of telepathic communication is discovered. But the device at the centre of the mystery is in the possession of two schoolboys and whether they stole it or invented it, there are powerful interests who will kill to get hold of it. Albert Campion faces as deadly a challenge as any in his career.
Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral. Soon other corpses start to turn up, just as Peters's body goes missing. It takes all Campion's coolly incisive powers of detection to unravel the crime.
Campion enters into a highly eccentric household where all is not what it seems and two suspicious deaths remain unsolved -- classic British crime writing at its best.