Beautiful film star Eve Eden's fiancé Hector Matthews died in a strange accident while the couple was visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1939.

Although he had no reason to commit suicide, he apparently flung himself off a high balcony to die hundreds of feet below—and no one was near him at the time, as the witnesses Gerald Hathaway and Paula Catford say.

Brian Innes, a painter who lives in Geneva too, is asked by his old school friend DeForrest Page to warn his daughter Audrey against continuing to associate with Eve.

When Eve Ferrier appears at the Hotel du Rhône, where Innes had been dining with Sir Gerald Hathaway, she proves to be carrying a perfume bottle filled with oil of vitriol, apparently to her own surprise.

[3] One the other hand Bob Hill, of the Spokane Daily Chronicle, felt the book was a disappointment, with little of the "enormous gusto" of his previous offerings.