This is one of a series of EC Bentley novels featuring the highly erudite artist qua reporter / detective, Philip Trent.

In it, Trent is sent to a charming English seaside village to cover the murder of Sigsbee Manderson for a large London newspaper. The victim is an unpopular and extremely powerful financial tycoon, who is murdered virtually within sight of his own house, at a time when it seems impossible that anyone there – to say nothing of all of its more than half dozen inhabitants – could have failed to see or hear the crime being committed.

As Trent pokes around, attention is focused on Manderson’s extremely troubled marriage, not least because Trent himself fall...