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

Colonel St Cyres, a landowner and farmer of Devon Cattle, rents a thatched cottage on his estate to a new tenant.

This is greatly to the annoyance of his daughter-in-law June, a spoilt Mayfair woman living with him while her husband is in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

June had hoped that her friend Tommy Gressingham would take the property, as part of his plans to build a luxury hotel on the site.

When the new tenant is found dead in the burned-out cottage, MacDonald is called in from Scotland Yard to investigate the possibility of murder.