Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley receives a visit from her barrister son, Ferdinand Lestrange, who brings with him a plea for help. The coastal convent and girls' school of Saint Peter's Finger reports that student Ursula Doyle has died under...
While en route to visit relatives, Hermione Lestrange falls into company with three agreeable women who are spending their autumn holiday in a forest cabin. Out for a drive, the group discovers a battered bicycle by the side of the road, and...
Laura's trip to her native Scotland--accompanying Dame Beatrice for a conference, the secretary finds the venture more pleasure than business--begins ominously when she witnesses at Inverness a man thrown into the path of a speeding lorry. A...
When two male students execute a rag against the nearby Calladale women's agricultural college--a prank involving rhubarb and dead rats--the ladies decide to give the men back some of their own. They collect the litter and sneak it over to a pub...
Called upon to probe the mysterious disappearance of two touring motorcoach drivers, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley uncovers a racket which involves stolen antiques, smuggling and murder. Later, a third driver is missing, but reappears to tell a...
Margaret and Kenneth Clifton pass their childhood summers with their two sets of aunts and uncles in the sleepy village of Hill. They spend their days playing in the town's sheepwash, avoiding Sunday school, investigating the old hermit's shack,...
The headmaster of the Sir George Etherege school for boys becomes understandably concerned when one of his senior staff, a geography teacher named Mr. Pythias, does not appear at school following a weekend break. In the days leading up to...
Nearing 70, matriarch Romula Leydon finds much at fault with her varied and colorfully-named family. An illegitimacy here, a touring stage actor there, and the lady finds herself disapproving of her flesh and blood kin more often than not. Romula...
Young Derek Lestrange, Mrs. Bradley's grandson, is in need of a scrapbook to complete a school assignment, and finds just the thing in the form of a heavy diary that belonged to an earlier tenant of the house his grandmother has rented. Asking...
Chelion Piper has been arrested under suspicion of murder. One of the tenants of his country apartment house, an unsocial and secretive old lady named Miss Minnie, was found by Chelion and two other men in her bungalow, dead in her bed. Suicide or...