It began with an advertisement in the paper requesting descendants of the late innkeeper to stay for a weekend at the inn. They arrived eager, a mixed assortment, but one of them got hideously murdered bringing the inn's stormy past to focus. Maud Silver was sent to investigate.
Mary Strokes was walking through Dead Man's Copse when she saw the body of a young woman dressed in a black coat, black gloves, no hat and an eternity ring set with diamonds in her ear but when she took Detective Sergeant Frank Abbott to the wood, the body had vanished.
Who was William Smith? And why was Mavis Jones so horrified to see him? The war had robbed William of his memory, and no one expected him to ever find out who he really was. So when he began work at Evesleys Ltd, why was his life so instantly in danger?
Assumed dead, Lady Anne Jocelyn meets varying degrees of welcome when she returns from Occupied France to her old life in England. Though her husband Sir Philip is not overjoyed to see her, he agrees to a trial reunion. But a murder raises his doubts, and then a second and third send Miss Silver to a curious consideration of life after death.