When Dido Hoare, antiquarian bookseller and amateur sleuth, offers to buy a collection belonging to an eccentric Oxford woman, she soon finds herself entangled in the loves and hatreds of the extraordinary Templeton family. Then the old woman is killed, and the valuable manuscript of an unpublished poem by a famous American is discovered in Dido's possession. Oxford CID seem convinced that Dido was a thief, or worse: and it takes all her courage, and the sharp eyes and wits of her father, retired Professor Barnabas Hoare, to save her from the grip of the law -- and of the killer.