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

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

[3] It was published in the United States by Doubleday under the alternative title of A Screen for Murder.

During World War II, in a London suffering from bombing raids, eight travellers and writers meet for a formal dinner at a highly-regarded French restaurant.

They continue with the dinner anyway but at the end a dead body is discovered.