Oxford professor Maggie Eliot is looking forward to enjoying her summer vacation with her husband Thomas at Beaumatin, his estate in the Cotswolds.Then she makes a distressing discovery and has a fight with Thomas, who accuses her of not living up to her responsibilities as the wife of the twenty-eighth Baron Raynham.Maggie is still trying to make peace with her husband when Thomas' daughter Constance arrives for a visit, along with her husband Nils and Sigismund Lösch, the head of a Swiss pharmaceutical company. Lösch is interested in one of Beaumatin's snowdrops which contains a high concentration of a chemical used in one of his company's drugs.Constance hates her father's second wife and goes out of her way to be disagreeable, while Lösch turns out to be more than slightly eccentric.When a priceless family heirloom, disappears, Thomas blames Maggie, who is certain Constance is behind the loss. Before she can clear herself, one of the estate's staff is found dead. Although it looks like natural causes, the body was moved after the man died.

But by whom? And why?.