While visiting her friend Judith Butler in Woodleigh Common, Ariadne Oliver assists the neighbors in planning a children's Hallowe'en Party at wealthy Rowena Drake's house.

Though no one appears to believe her, Joyce is found drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket after the party; distraught, Mrs Oliver summons Hercule Poirot to solve the case.

Fearing another murder, Poirot sends a telegram to Mrs Oliver, instructing her to take Judith and her daughter to London.

Poirot muses that Rowena likely would have shared a similar fate to Olga, as Garfield's motivation for the murder was his obsession with constructing a second, more perfect garden.

Author and academic Robert Barnard, who in 1980 wrote a monograph on Christie, stated, "The plot of this late one is not too bad, but the telling is very poor: it is littered with loose ends, unrealised characters, and maintains only a marginal hold on the reader's interest.

He notes how Christie was downbeat about what she perceived as rising cruelty and criminality in the wider world and that she read reports on current crime as a part of her inspiration.

[10] The novel was adapted as part of the twelfth series of Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet, with Zoë Wanamaker reprising her role as Ariadne Oliver.

Guest stars include Deborah Findlay as Rowena Drake, Julian Rhind-Tutt as Michael Garfield, Amelia Bullmore as Judith Butler, and Fenella Woolgar as Elizabeth Whittaker.

The television adaptation shifted the late 1960s setting to the 1930s, as with nearly all episodes in this series, and changed a number of the fates and details of the characters, but is otherwise faithful to the novel.

The novel was loosely adapted by Kenneth Branagh in 2023 for his third Poirot film,[11] re-titled A Haunting in Venice and relocated from England to the titular city.