The scene is a fashionable French seaside resort; the witness, Eve Neill, is looking out of her window in the early hours of the morning when she sees the battered body of her prospective father-in-law in the room opposite.
It is no ordinary murder case that brings the famed French detective Monsieur Bencolin out of retirement, but one that involves a midnight rendezvous on a steamy Paris night, a broken love affair, and four different murder weapons found in the secret villa where the body is discovered.
On his return to Geneva, Brian Innes must meet Audrey Page and find a way to prevent her from joining the strangely temperamental group of people gathered around film star Eve Eden at the Villa Rosalind.
Christopher Kent, worth a quarter of a million pounds yet without a penny in his pocket, stands hungrily in Piccadilly one snowy morning, looking up at the huge hotel, when a piece of card bearing a number floats down to him.
In the shadowy hallway of clockmaker Johannes Carver's house a policeman is found murdered, the arrow-tipped minute hand of an antique clock embedded in his neck.
John Raven and his wife Kirstie are holidaying in Lisbon at Ilona Szecheyi's villa when Ilona's father Stephen reveals his well-guarded secret: shortly before the communist occupation of Hungary in 1945, he was entrusted with 17 million in government gold bullion.
When Kirstie Macfarlane's younger brother is framed for stealing a Van Eyck portrait, she puts the case in the able hands of ex-Scotland Yard Inspector John Raven.
When John Raven is somehow connected to the case of a criminal abortion that ended in death he finds himself embroiled with his old nemesis, former Chief Superintendent Drake of Scotland Yard.
Terminally ill Polish refugee Henryk Lamprecht, a decoder for British Security, has a score to settle with the Russian who killed his wife and daughter.
Zaleski is a middle-aged philanderer determined to retrieve the Virgin's Dowry, a jeweled monstrance worth 500,000, which has reappeared for display in an art gallery in Conduit Street in London.
When Evelyn Henshaw comes to Rosa Epton's office demanding that in the event of her disappearance her husband be investigated for murder, Rosa is more than a little doubtful.
When schoolboy Jason Cutler is killed late one night in a hit-and-run, the police are puzzled by the presence of a letter in his locker, to which is attached a five-pound note.
Deepwood Grange is no longer what it was in the thirties: the beautiful old house has been converted into luxury apartments, and the original family is long gone.
A prominent judge is murdered on the opening day of the new Runnymede Crown Court, and Rosa Epton become doubly involved, both as a witness to the murder and the solicitor in a drugs trial over which Judge Ambrose was to have presided.
In the fourth Rosa Epton mystery, Underwood's protagonist, whom Mystery Magazine declared 'one of mystery fiction's most talented attorneys', is called upon to defend the scapegrace younger brother of an acquaintance.
