It is set in London, mainly in Wapping in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, and centers on the city's oldest publishing house, Peverell Press, headquartered in a mock-Venetian palace on the River Thames.

The murder of Peverell Press's managing director, ambitious Gerard Etienne, seems to be the horrible end of a series of malicious pranks in the company headquarters.

As ever, Lady James, the grande dame of fictional forensic pathology, vividly renders the ugly reality of violent death: the smell of a corpse, the look of an autopsy in a sterile post-mortem room, the random residue of lives abruptly stopped.

"[1] Conversely, Iain Sinclair reviewed the book for the London Review of Books and wrote "This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture... An increasingly silly catalogue of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology.

Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto... Autopilot opinions suggesting that the author has donated far too much of her time to media book-gabble and the smokefree backrooms of power.