Karen Leith is a novelist whose fictional life and works bear a resemblance to Pearl S. Buck—she was raised in Japan and writes novels that are set there, but lives in Manhattan surrounded by Japanese customs, art and furnishings.

One day, the doctor's daughter, Eva, finds Karen with her throat cut in the writer's Washington Square home.

The investigation by Ellery Queen confronts this puzzle and also turns up startling information about a long-vanished relative of Karen Leith.

After ten popular mystery novels and the first of many movies, the character of Ellery Queen was at this point firmly established.

This period in the Ellery Queen canon signals a change in the type of story told, moving away from the intricate puzzle mystery format which had been a hallmark of nine previous novels, each with a nationality in their title and a "Challenge to the Reader" immediately before the solution was revealed.