Sayers's story opens in 1936 at a restaurant in Paris, where Harriet and Peter are enjoying a brief respite between the execution of the murderer he brought to justice in Busman's Honeymoon and the demands of the Wimsey family and social position back home. At the restaurant they are introduced to Laurence and Rosamund Harwell, a rich Englishman and his beautiful young wife, and the lives of the two couples begin to intertwine - and, ultimately, to take a dangerous turn. In Jill Paton Walsh's masterful development of Sayers's chapters and notes, readers are treated not only to a deeply satisfying detective puzzle but also to a thought-provoking portrait of two very different marriages.