The plot concerns a murder during an amateur theatrical performance in a Dorset village, which Alleyn and his colleague Fox are dispatched from Scotland Yard to investigate and duly solve.

In the picturesque village of Vale-of-Pen-Cuckoo, tensions are running high amongst the seven people who gather to discuss a charity production to raise funds for a new church piano.

The local squire, Jocelyn Jerningham, disapproves of his son's, Henry, relationship with Dinah Copeland, the rector's daughter.

The Jerninghams are somewhat impoverished nobles and Henry needs to marry a wealthy woman in order to maintain the estate of Pen Cuckoo.

Jocelyn's cousin, Eleanor Prentice, is a sexless spinster who is madly in love with Rector Copeland and also disapproves of Henry and Dinah's relationship.

Biographer Margaret Lewis[1] describes how "her extended stays with the Rhodes family in various country houses... gave Ngaio the material she needed for several novels.

In her more recent Marsh biography, Joanne Drayton[2] discusses at some length Overture to Death's central theme of love pursued, frustrated or fulfilled, contrasting the forbidden Henry-Dinah romance with the toxic Idris-Eleanor rivalry for the Rector's affections.

The novel is a classic example of what crime writer Colin Watson termed "The Mayhem Parva School" of genteel English village murder mystery from the "Golden Age" between the world wars.

[3] Despite the ingeniously gruesome murder method, it is essentially a social comedy of manners, with the amusingly awful rivalry between two ageing spinster ladies to dominate their cosy little society of village, church and charitable affairs, each performing a favourite piano piece on every possible occasion, reminiscent of E F Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels of the same period.

[6] Wilson singles out the Queens of Crime of the "English genteel" school, including Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, whose The Nine Tailors and Overture To Death respectively are subjected to criticism.