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.

The vagaries of memory, the legacy of war. The last thing in the world Richard Jury wants to think about is the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood, and made orphans of so many of the gaunt and sad-eyed children pictured in this handful of snapshots his old friend Mickey Haggerty shoves towards him on his desk.