[1] [2] It is the fifteenth in his series of novels featuring the Golden Age Detective Sir Clinton Driffield, the Chief Constable of a rural English county.

Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to assist the inspector in charge of the case and is helped by some information he previously knew about the inhabitants of the place.

It is soon clear that the dead man, a notorious and loathed moneylender, had his throat cut long before he was set about by the cheetah who was defending its mistress.

In a contemporary review in The New Statesman Ralph Partridge wrote "No Past is Dead has rather a tame plot, but is justified by one of the most wonderful alibis I have ever seen built up".

The suave, foxy chief constable has to solve a complex high-life-in-a-small-town murder case in which a moneylender is first shot and then mauled by a cheetah belonging to a Creole actress suffering from Jacksonian epilepsy.