At a dinner party, Markos introduces another outsider, Dr Basil Schramm, newly arrived medical incumbent at Greengages Hotel, a classy, expensive health retreat, where Sybil Foster is a frequent guest.

When Sybil's newly revised will appears, its dispositions prove shockingly unexpected, and the resulting suspicions bring Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn to Quintern and Greengages, with his team of Detective-Inspector Fox and Thompson (photography) and Bailey (fingerprints).

In the background lurks the 'Black Alexander', a priceless postage stamp, which disappeared when Sybil's first husband Maurice Carter was killed in a bombed train, returning from Quintern Place to London during the War.

Newgate Callendar (pseudonym for Harold C Schonberg), writing in The New York Times, found this novel, a traditional mystery featuring the suave Alleyn, to be one popular with fans of Ngaio Marsh, but other readers might find it "just a mite slow‐moving.

Later biographer Joanne Drayton [4] also comments on the struggles Marsh faced with a book she described in a letter to her agent Edmund Cork as having "hung round my neck like the Ancient Mariner's Albatross" and "been interrupted so often by illness".