Lorac, the pen name of the British writer Edith Caroline Rivett.

[1][2] It is the ninth in her long-running series featuring Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard, a Golden Age detective who relies on standard police procedure to solve his cases.

[3] It was her first novel published by Collins Crime Club after switching from Sampson Low, partly on the success of the previous entry in the series The Organ Speaks.

In a Lancashire mining town during the 1935 General Election, a communist agitator is found murdered while on his way to disrupt a speaking engagement by the Conservative Party candidate.

Tensions are further raised when a hardline nationalist politician sets his own party followers to investigate the murder.