Among the passengers are the painter Agatha Troy, who is painting the receding wharf at Suva, discreetly observed by Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn returning from his last case in New Zealand.

Back in England, Troy hosts her art class consisting of eight students who paint and sculpt model Sonia Gluck.

Sonia is a temperamental model who often breaks her uncomfortable pose on her throne, which requires Troy or another student to shove her shoulder down back in place.

Sonia has had affairs with both unpleasant but very talented sculptor Wolf Garcia and Basil Pilgrim, whose father is a deeply religious peer.

Valmai Seacliff is engaged to Pilgrim but had past dalliances and flirtations with Cedric Malmsley, Watt Hatchett and Fracis Ormerin.

Malmsley decides to paint Sonia with a dagger stabbing her through the back and Troy and the students set up the throne with a knife poking out from under the boards in such a way that it lines up with the model's heart.

Phillida Lee tells Alleyn that she overheard Garcia and Sonia arguing and heard something about a meetup Friday night.

She then helped Garcia pack and move his stuff to the London warehouse where she killed him by pouring nitric acid down his throat, burning her hand in the process.

With the notable exception of Agatha Christie, whose Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple did not lend themselves to a 'love interest', in the 1930s, the 'Golden Age Crime Queens'introduced romantic partners for their series detectives.

Margery Allingham's Albert Campion charted a parallel romantic and matrimonial course through the 1930s, and in Artists In Crime, Ngaio Marsh introduced the painter Agatha Troy, with whom her detective Roderick Alleyn falls in love.

"[1] Dr Lewis reflects that the introductory "description in Artists In Crime of the tall figure of Troy, with her short, dark hair, thin face and hands, absent-minded, shy and funny, seems very close to the Ngaio Marsh who absorbed that scene [the wharf at Suva] on the way back to New Zealand in 1932 and who had then been painting seriously for over ten years."