Gervase Fen investigates an Oxford toy shop replaced overnight by a grocery store. Poetic Richard Cadogan found the apparently strangled body of an old woman upstairs, but she vanishes as well.
Before odious Edwin Shorthouse can sing the lead in the first Oxford post-war Die Meistersinger, someone kills him in his own locked dressing room. Gervase Fen, eccentric professor of English Literature with a passion for amateur detecting, is on the case. American title is Dead and Dumb.
Marcia Lloyd and her brother Arthur have spent every summer of their lives exploring the grand halls and seaside grounds of their family's idyllic vacation home, a gorgeous old mansion called Sunset House built by their grandfather. But when Arthur's ex-wife Juliette arrives at Sunset to demand alimony from him, things take a dark turn and Juliette disappears--her body found a week later. What sordid secrets lie within the creaky old manor? Marcia and the local sheriff Russell Shand must work against the clock to find the murderer in this seemingly utopian upper-class hamlet