American bachelor Miles Drummond, living in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and running out of money, half-heartedly places an ad in a few US newspapers announcing a summer art workshop.
On the surface, they seem like three very different people: Danny Bronson, a cunning ex-con struggling to go straight; his brother, Lee, a former Gridiron star turned college professor; and Johnny Keefler, a crooked parole officer who lives for revenge.
There was blood on the drawing-room floor and Hazel Deerhurst had disappeared wearing slippers over walking shoes, two pairs of stockings and a bright silk kimono.
In this, the tenth Clinton Driffield mystery, the action moves away from a country setting to the English suburbs, inhabited by a cast of unusual diversity: an ambitious young policeman, a naive journalist, an elderly clerk with dreams of foreign travel and an unhappily married Frenchwoman.
When Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield goes to stay with his friend Wendover, mysterious goings-on in the boathouse he owns soon attract the duo's attention.
Scott Hamilton is a professional thief, one who would never turn down an opportunity to steal something really worthwhile - in this case, a priceless collection of Ming Dynasty jade statuettes, whose owner is a man with a private army; a man rich enough to be above the law.
Ross Macintyre is a tough Canadian journalist in Paris on a routine mission when he finds himself deeply involved in the consequences of the wrongful imprisonment of Radnor Brown; Radnor is charged with rape, for which the scenario and the evidence have been carefully set up by people who want him out of the way.
It was largely chance that took Dougal Macneil to the empty racetrack that morning, but when he inadvertently sees - and photographs - something he shouldn't he is soon under threat from a seemingly omnipotent force.
Journalist Hamish Hunter finds himself in possession of a film on which the fate of several people and the relations between two countries - Poland and Great Britain - depend.
Kit Hendry has several criminal convictions, but now he is given the choice of a twelve-year sentence or a government mission to trace the security leakage from a Dusseldorf installation.
Gerry Steel's loyalty to the man he worked for is total, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that Sullivan, on trial on an attempted murder charge, goes free.
Paul Gregory, a Canadian confidence trickster operating in London, targets a wealthy Canadian woman in Britain to sell her collection of valuable coins.
When ex-Detective Inspector John Raven goes on jury duty, the trial he attends is the prosecution of an Englishman and his German girlfriend for heroin smuggling.
Ex-cop and investigator John Raven becomes involved with a killing carried out in England but arranged by US Intelligence services with the connivance of their English equivalents.
It's 1927 and New Orleans-born novelist Jeff Caldwell is called back to that most colourful of American cities by a frantic letter from Dave Hobart, a boyhood friend.
Jim Blake, journalist and successful spy novelist, is sent to New Orleans to do a story on James Claiborne Blake, a congressional hopeful in the 1912 election.
