The crisp new snow and bright morning sunshine give a deceptively benevolent air to the Northamptonshire village of Long Piddleton at the start of the Christmas holidays. For the local inn, The Man With A Load Of Mischief, is the venue for a particularly grisly murder - and one that took place while many of the village's most distinguished residents were on the premises: the scatty vicar of St Rules; a mystery writer of dubious reputation and his voluptuous secretary; the inn's urbane proprietor and a lovely poetess rumoured to be his fiancee.
When the local constabulary fail to make any progress with the murder enquiry, they enlist the aid of Scotland Yard's irrepressibly unconventional Inspector Richard Jury. Co-opting the help of the blue-blooded Melrose Plant and the more proletarian talent of hypochondriac Sergeant Wiggins, Jury sets skeletons rattling in every cupboard as he traces the solution to the mystery to an earlier crime. But not before the murderer has struck again . . .
