Looking forward to a quiet retirement in Cornwall after a lifetime of international travel, widow Eleanor is inadvertently drawn into a murder investigation involving her wrongly accused artist friend and her detective niece.

Feisty flapper Daisy Dalrymple is a breath of fresh air to the occupants of gloomy Occles Hall in Cheshire, among them her former school chum, wallflower Bobbie Parslow, and the thorny mistress of the manor, Lady Valeria. While photographing the barren ground behind the house, Daisy suspects someone has been digging amidst the soil's first green shoots—and promptly unearths the corpse of Grace Moss, the missing parlor maid. So begins a harrowing...

"After many years working around the world for an international charity in the late 1960s, Eleanor Trewynn has retired to the relative quiet of a small town in Cornwall. But her quiet life is short-lived when, due to her experience, the Commonwealth Relations Office reaches out to her to assist in a secret conference that is to take place in a small hotel outside the historical village of Tintagel. Meanwhile, her niece, Detective Sargent Megan Pencarrow,...

While out on a walk, Eleanor Trewynn, her niece Megan, and her neighbor Nick spot a young, half-drowned Indian man floating in the water. Delerious and concussed, he utters a cryptic message about his family being trapped in a cave and his mother dying. The young man, unconscious and unable to help, is whisked away to a hospital while a desperate effort is mounted find the missing family in time. The local police inspector presumes that they are refugees...

In 1925, the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, her husband, Alec Fletcher (a Scotland Yard Detective) and their new twin infant children inherit and move to a new, larger house on the outskirts of London proper, in a stage of slight disrepair (thanks to an aged, now deceased, uncle). Set in a small circle of houses and a communal garden, it seems a near idyllic setting. That is until a dead body turns up half-hidden under the bushes of the communal...

"In December 1923, the formidable Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple has decided that for Christmas the family will all gather at Brockdene in Cornwall at the invitation of Lord Westmoor. Her daughter - Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher - is something less than pleased but yields to the demands of her mother, especially as she'll be there just before the holidays working on another article for Town and Country about the estate itself. But the family gathering quickly...

"In England in the late 1920s, The Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, on a convalescent trip to the countryside, goes to visit three old school friends in the area. The three, all unmarried, have recently bought a house together. They are a part of thegeneration of "superfluous women"--brought up expecting marriage and a family, but left without any prospects after more than 700,000 British men were killed in the Great War. Daisy and her husband...

Daisy discovers the dead body of a Yeoman Warder when she visits the Bloody Tower and observes the Ceremony of the Keys.

In early 1925, the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher--recent mother of twins--resumes her journalistic career by agreeing to write a piece about the Tower of London--the Bloody Tower--for an American magazine. Invited to observe the centuries-old ritual Ceremony of the Keys, she's spending the night (her first time away from her babies) since the complex is locked and guarded, and the high walls are surrounded by a disused moat. Having been given...