The Sommita lay spread-eagled on her back across a red counterpane. The bosom of her red biblical dress had been torn down to the waist and under her left breast, irrelevantly, unbelievably, the haft of a knife stuck out. The right arm, rigid as a branch, was raised in the fascist salute. She might have been posed for the jacket on an all-too-predictable shocker…
A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face, and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog. She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river, and found the body of Colonel Carterette with his spaniel beside it, mourning him.
Hyacinths… mad singing… Scattered pearls… and a strangled beauty every ten days… Inspector Alleyn believed the killer was on a sleek cruiser bound for South Africa. It was now the tenth day out, and everyone, including the famed Alleyn, felt the horror closing in…
Peering into the early morning dark as his train neared its destination, Alleyn glimpsed a horrifying tableau. A lighted window masked by a spring blind. A woman falling against the blind and releasing it. Farther back in the room, a man in a flowing white garment, his face in shadow. Beyond his right shoulder, something that looked like a huge wheel. His right arm was raised. And in his hand… Abruptly, the weird scene was cut off as the train roared into a tunnel… And it was only later, in an ancient chateau, that Alleyn discovered the ghastly truth of what he had witnessed!
Inspector Alleyn had so many suspects for the murder of the Home Secretary, that, for once, he was at a loss. Except for one detail — one grisly little detail — that only the likes of Roderick Alleyn would ever notice…
Christmas time in an isolated country house and, following a flaming row in the kitchen, there's murder inside. When a much disliked visiting servant disappears without trace after playing Santa Claus, foul play is at once suspected — and foul play it proves to be. Only suspicion falls not on the staff but on the guests, all so unimpeachably respectable that the very thought of murder in connection with any of them seems almost heresy. When Superintendent Roderick Alleyn returns unexpectedly from a trip to Australia, it is to find his beloved wife in the thick of an intriguing mystery…
On vacation in New Zealand, Inspector Alleyn meets a theater troupe engaged in a real-life drama more killing than anything they’ve ever staged. When the producer is struck down at a celebration party with a jeroboam of champagne. Inspector Alleyn moves quickly behind the scenes. There he encounters a malevolent Maori idol, a peculiar will, and an unknown thespian whose role is pure murder…
It was April in Rome, and gathered together in the church of San Tommaso in Pallario was the kind of varied group of people that can only meet on a tour. They were there under the aegis of one Sebastian Mailer, who had promised them a most unconventional tour — a claim no one later disputed, after encountering murder, blackmail and drug-running. Inspector Roderick Alleyn, in Rome on a special mission, became involved in the case, and found it one of his most baffling — a case in which every suspect might equally well prove a victim…
