Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs – a writer with a vast public that loved his best-selling mystery novels, and a small circle of family and friends who despised him as an obese, overbearing bully – died with distinction while sipping a special liqueur in his luxurious library on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.

What a surprise to discover that the son who hated him most had been bequeathed the lion’s share of his father’s fortune… that Sir Oliver’s final manuscript, possibly worth millions, had vanished… and that the demise of a famous mystery writer was clearly a case of murder