[1][2] It is the thirty fourth in her long-running series featuring Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard.

[3] Like a number of Lorac's works it takes the form of a country house mystery, a popular branch of the genre during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

Maurice Richardson in a review in The Observer wrote "The usual carefully constructed, rural family murder case which we expect from this eminently trustworthy exponent of the English school of whodunnit."

Living in the grand Templedean Place in the Cotswolds, the Vanstead family are riven by mistrust and conflict.

This is particularly directed towards the heir Gerald, returned from a Japanese internment camp in Malaya along with a brash Australian wife Muriel.