After a murder at their neighbor's Hampstead birthday party is followed up by a killing at the Villa Byzantine, Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne must sort through a number of varied suspects, including a royal biographer, an elderly researcher, the second victim's daughter, and an aging actress.

When a birthday party for one of their Hampstead neighbors turns deadly, Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne end up investigating the murder of one of Melisande Chevret's other guests. The aging actress becomes a natural suspect, as the victim was her love rival. But after the first murder, a second takes place at the Villa Byzantine. The owner of the house is royal biographer Tancred Vane, who swears he is innocent. And surely Catherine Hope, an elderly lady helping him with his research, can have nothing to do with it. A damning piece of evidence points to the victim's daughter—but why would a teenage girl have a dainty silk handkerchief bearing her monogram? And would she drop it so conveniently beside her mother's body? As the questions mount, Antonia Darcy and Major Payne search desperately for answers.

What role does the mysterious Miss Hope, former governess to the Bulgarian royal family, play in the bizarre murder at the Villa Byzantine? And does she in fact actually exist?

Lord Remnant’s eccentric parties on his privately owned Caribbean island of Grenadin are the stuff of legends ... but then the 12th Earl suddenly dies in the course of an amateur production of The Murder of Gonzago, the play within a play in Hamlet. The Times obituary gives the cause of death as “heart attack.” However, an anonymous video tape showing Lord Remnant’s final moments makes it clear that the nobleman’s demise was far from natural. As it happens so often, Antonia and Hugh Payne get involved in the sinister events surrounding Lord Remnant’s death entirely by accident. They are intrigued by the boldness of the murder, which seems to have been committed within a full view of Lord Remnant’s wife Clarissa and their four guests. Who killed Lord Remnant? Was it his drug-addicted stepson Stephan? Was it Clarissa’s Aunt Hortense, whose past contains a dark and shocking secret? Was it, as Stephan claims, the demonic “Grimaud”? Or perhaps it is the elusive Mr. Quin, who is left a vast amount of money in Lord Remnant’s will, for no apparent reason. From the Hardcover edition.

Do plots involving exchanged murders still work and who exactly is the victim? Antonia Darcy never imagined that taking her young grandson to his first day at nursery school would embroil her in a most baffling case of mistaken identity and murder. Major Payne, on the other hand, believed that it was their destiny. Olga Klimt played a dangerous game with the affections of the men in love with her, though she knew perfectly well there might be a high price to pay ... Among the unlikely murder suspects is a rich young heir to a biscuit fortune, his Aconite-addicted mother, his manservant and the headmistress of a prestigious nursery school. In this, their ninth investigation, husband and wife sleuths, Antonia Darcy and Major Payne, search desperately for answers before the killer strikes again.

Detective story writer Antonia Darcy and her husband Hugh Payne are asked to travel to Devon in order to prevent a murder on Sphinx Island, but they are far from enthusiastic as they suspect an elaborate joke. And when they hear that one of the house party guests is Romaine Garrison -Gore, another crime writer, they have no doubt that they will walk into a rather tedious variant of the Murder Weekend. After all, it is their tenth wedding anniversary and Major Payne's aunt, Lady Grylls, has been trying to think of a truly original present for them . . . But then they receive a rather sinister letter signed 'The Riddler' and become curious . . . could the devil speak true?

"This killer is murdering members of a dubious religious sect, the New Pantheon, and leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on their corpses. Meanwhile, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor of human migrations, clandestinely writing a novel about the Byzantine princess-historian Anna Comnena, disappears on a quest to learn more about an ancestor who roamed across Europe to Byzantium during the First Crusade. Kristeva's recurring characters, detective Northrop Rilsky and the French journalist Stephanie Delacour, step in and desperately try to piece together the two-part mystery in the midst of their unexpected love affair.".