Literary critic and amateur detective Adam Ludlow reluctantly agrees to give a talk on Sheridan's play The School for Scandal to an amateur dramatics society. But what he thought would be an easy, if rather tedious favour for a colleague, turns into a puzzling murder mystery that reunites him with his police detective friend Montero.

This is the second in a five-book series of Adam Ludlow murder mysteries, and was named among the ninety crime and detective novels named by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in their influential Catalogue of Crime, in 1971. It was republished by Garland in 1983 as one of the 'Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1960-75'.