Wulfstane Manor, a rambling old country house with many unused rooms, winding staircases and a maze of cellars, had been bequeathed to Veronica Mallowood and her brother Martin. The last time the large family of Mallowoods had all foregathered under the ancestral roof was on the occasion of their father’s funeral, and there had been one of those unholy rows which not infrequently follow the reading of a will. That was some years ago, and as Veronica found it increasingly difficult to go on paying for the upkeep of Wulfstane, she summoned another family conference - a conference in which Death took a hand. Rope’s End, Rogue’s End is, of course, an Inspector MacDonald case, in which that popular detective plays a brilliant part.

Proceeding from the premise that Jews, negatively depicted according to a range of demeaning stereotypes, are a feature of English crime writing between the two world wars, the author examines why this is so, with reference to recent debate over the profundity of anti-Semitism in Britain, and traces the evolution of fictional Jewish images in the context of socio-historical trends and events. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Templedean Place in the Cotswold Hills of England was among the last of the truly aristocratic estates, where old family traditions still flourished. When Gerald Vanstead arrived from Australia with his family, to attend his father in his last illness, other, more deadly things flourished. Gerald's wife was the bickering kind; he drank too much, was given to feuding with the chauffeur, and seemed excessively tightlipped and disagreeable—and so no one was particularly sorry when one day the brakes on Gerald's car failed to hold, and he and his wife were killed. A family picnic ended in the accidental death of another Vanstead, a fire destroyed what might have been a clue, and there was a night of horrible suspense before Inspector Macdonald could say who hated Gerald Vanstead the most and who, in a house of cultured, well-bred men and women, was most capable of murder.