A schoolmaster in a tiny town in West Virginia is found on Christmas morning beheaded and crucified to a signpost in such a way that his body seems to form the letter "T".

Ellery cannot solve the crime with the little information he has, but six months later in Long Island, New York, a neighbour of one of his university professors is found headless and crucified to a totem pole in the same way, in the new neighbourhood of the Egyptian prophet and his followers.

Many events turn on the families of the victims and their interaction with the Egyptian nudists, the game of checkers and the smoking of unusually-carved pipes, but the key clue that leads Ellery to the solution is a bottle of iodine that enables him to go on a cross-country chase and hunt down the murderer.

The character of Ellery Queen was probably suggested by the novels featuring detective Philo Vance by S.S. Van Dine, which were very popular at the time.

It contains some similarity to the subsequent The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr (1935) in that both are concerned with three brothers from the same general area of the world who are involved in a murder plot based on long-ago events.