[1] With a classic 'Golden Age' crime novel's setting, in the idyllic, self-contained, rural English community of Swevenings, the suspects are all members of a tight-knit social group revolving around the local baronet and his family, the Lacklanders.

The memoirs include the admission that, as a high-ranking diplomat before World War Two, the baronet had treasonably put class before country in what has been called the Herrenvolk democracy.

[citation needed] Through its plot, characters and solution, the book is frankly critical of its rural gentry, their values and actions, especially in key confrontations between Lady Lacklander and the dead boy's father, and between the kindly, conservative District Nurse Kettle and the interloper revealed to be the murderer, for whom considerable reader sympathy is elicited.

He saluted Scales of Justice as "right up to sample, with a most ingenious fishy clue (which is far from being a red herring), a nice country setting, and a bevy of well-assorted characters of whom one, Nurse Kettle, seemed to me quite brilliantly drawn".

It is interesting that, according to Marsh's first biographer Margaret Lewis, a proposed and abandoned 1955 BBC radio adaptation has the reader's filed note: "we should have to eliminate the appalling snobbishness".