Jury is yet to finish his first pint in the village of Long Piddleton when he finds a corpse inside a beautiful rosewood desk recently acquired by the local antiques dealer, Marshall trueblood. The body belongs to Simon Lean, a notorious philanderer. An endless list of suspects leads Jury and his aristocratic sidekick, Melrose Plant, to the nearby country estate where Lean's long-suffering wife resides. But Jury's best clue comes in London at a pub called the Five Bells and Bladebone. There he learns about Lean's liaison with a disreputable woman named Sadie, who could have helped solve the case.........if she wasn't already dead.