Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by John Atkinson Grimshaw, George Inness and Winslow Homer. A wedding party in an old stone house, a body in the morning, and an elderly bachelor doctor who is the only person keeping his head. Ernest Poate was a physician who wrote detective novels in which the medical evidence actually matters. The book is fair with the reader about the evidence. This edition adds a gallery of 58 plates of painting, among them works by John Atkinson Grimshaw, George Inness and Ann Hall, alongside one restored and coloured illustration.

Ernest M. Poate (1884-1935) was an American physician who ran an asylum and wrote detective stories in which the doctor is the detective and the medicine is accurate.