During a walk to Elvedon House, palatial home of the Tythertons, Sir John Appleby and Chief Constable Colonel Pride are stunned to find a police van and two cars parked outside. Wealthy Maurice Tytherton has been found shot dead, and Appleby is faced with a number of suspects.

Author of detective novels, Priscilla Pringle, is pleased to find that she is sharing a railway compartment with a gentleman who happens to be reading one of her books - Murder in the Cathedral. He offers her œ500 to collaborate on a detective novel.

Arbuthnot is paying for a rash decision - he recently married a beautiful but slightly amoral girl whose crazy antics caught his rather cynical professional interest. His wife has taken a lover, Rupert Slade, and Arbuthnot wants nothing more than to see him dead - but then it happens!

Appleby's End was where Detective Inspector John Appleby got off the train from Scotland Yard. But that was not the only coincidence. Why did Ranulph Raven's mysterious descendants make such a point of inviting Appleby to spend the night at their house?

Inspector Appleby is stranded on a very strange island, with a rather odd bunch of people - too many men, too few women (and one of them too attractive) cause a deal of trouble. But that is nothing compared to later developments.

Sir John Appleby dines one evening at Allington Park, the Georgian home of his acquaintance Owain Allington. The evening comes to an end but just as Appleby is leaving, they find a dead man - electrocuted in the son et lumiŠre box which had been installed in the grounds.

Fifty years after Ralph Dangerfield's death, a collector of literary curiosities claims to have his diary and threatens to blackmail fashionable London with belated secrets about people now in respectable old age. Sir John Appleby reveals how he uncovered this unscrupulous crime, along with seventeen more intriguing cases.