Private detective Cordelia Gray is invited to the sunlit island of Courcy to protect the vainly beautiful actress Clarissa Lisle from veiled threats on her life. Within the rose red walls of a fairy-tale castle, she finds the stage is set for death.
When Commander Dalgliesh is persuaded by an old friend to visit the Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he can have no idea that he will return to it one week later under very different circumstances. One of the family trustees has been horribly murdered and Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a death which, from the first, is fraught with complications. Even before the murder, the museum was in tumult. A new lease is due to be signed and two of the trustees are determined to keep the museum open, the third passionately determined on its closure.
Two bodies, their throats cut with brutal precision, lie in a waste of blood in the dingy vestry of St Matthew's Church, Paddington. One is an alcoholic tramp; the other, Sir Paul Berowne, a recently resigned Minister of the Crown. Dalgliesh arrives to begin his investigations.
Unsettled by a brush with death and disenchanted with his job in the Force, Commander Adam Dalgliesh responds to an invitation to visit an old family friend, the chaplain at a private home for the disabled in Dorset. On arrival he discovers that his host has died suddenly.
