[1][2] It is the first in a series of novels featuring Chief Inspector Meredith, promoted at the end of case to Superintendent.

Set in the Lake District of Northern England, it shows the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French novels by featuring a detective who methodically breaks down the alibis of his suspects.

In 2014 it was reissued by the British Library Publishing as part of a group of republished crime novels from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The body of a man is found at the lonely filling station in Cumbria where he is a partner, asphyxiated by car exhaust fumes.

Meredith and his colleagues begin to suspect that the dead man has been silenced by his associates in some elaborate criminal scheme using a series of petrol deliveries as a front.