At Valentine Loft's polished country estate, a weekend house party sparkles with flirtation, vanity, and razor-edged wit, but the guests' favorite pastime is a chilling one: talking murder. Around the veranda and dinner table, Anna Knox teases, Pauline Fuller glows with poised beauty, and Loft presides as a genial, self-assured host, while Bob Baldwin, Ned Knox, and the others trade theories about poison, strangling, stabbing, and the perfect undetectable crime. Into this clever, slightly decadent circle comes Hugh Curran, a celebrated mystery writer and former movie actor, whose plain appearance belies his fame and whose sharp talk about clues and circumstantial evidence exposes everyone's assumptions. Then Curran is found dead, and the drawing-room banter turns into real danger. Detective Kinney begins piecing together the case, searching rooms for the missing watch and probing the private tensions beneath the social surface. A maid overhears sobbing at Pauline's door; Anna grows suspicious; Bob starts to suspect a hidden bond between Pauline and Loft; and the discovery of a gold watch in Pauline's room suggests that the truth may be far closer, and far more personal, than anyone imagined. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.