Wilfrid Stirling asks Paul Temple to investigate the murer of his daughter, for which her boyfriend Howard Gilbert has already been convicted and sentenced to hang. As Temple races against time there are more murders, but why has a shoe been taken from each victim?

This novelisation of the radio serial Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case also includes a bonus short story, ‘Paul Temple and the Nightingale’.

On a boat trip from the fishing village of Downburgh, Paul and Steve Temple are shot at and later the boatman dies in a cliff-top fall. Back in London, the daughter of the head of M.I.5. has disappeared and it soon transpires there is a connection.

Swinging between London and Geneva, Paul Temple and Steve are involved in a case that involves finding the answer to one vital question: is Carl Milbourne, thought to have perished in a car accident, still alive? There are those who are determined to stop the Temples discovering the truth. And Temple's own life is in danger.

Returning from America by ocean liner, the Temples meet wealthy Sam Portland whose UK agent Hubert Greene has received messages about Portland's past from a private detective called Madison. But Portland dies on board, and Temple is left to unravel a case involving international counterfeiters and the clue of a coin on a watch-chain.

What could possibly connect expensive Margo ‘designer’ coats, an industrialist, a petrified celebrity, and a psychiatrist with a peculiar secretary?