Investigating the bizarre will of late multimillionaire Noel Hawthorne--who left the bulk of his estate to his mistress and nearly nothing to his three sisters--astute sleuth Nero Wolfe stumbles upon a legacy of murder.

Sherlock Holmes is the best-known of all fictional detectives. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and with assistance from Dr. Watson, Holmes' powers of observation and deduction are without equal. Watson, the master storyteller of these mysteries, evokes the rich atmosphere of Victorian London.

The coroner's verdict: suicide, after beautiful heiress Rosemary Barton dies from drinking a cyanide-laced glass of chanpagne at her own birthday party. Her husband George doesn't believe it, based on two anonymous letters that suggest murder. But who has a motive? Rosemary's lover or the lover's spurned wife, her penniless sister, or even George or his secretary? One year after her death, six gather for dinner in remembrance. The plan is to trap...

In all his years of detecting, Nero Wolfe has never encountered an investigation as damnably messy as this one. For what began as a clean case of larceny quickly sank into a quagmire of blackmail and broken promises, international scandal and cold-blooded murder. Now Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin, must bridge eras and oceans to find the link between a Wild West lynching and a respected British peer. Only then can they save Wolfe's beautiful...