It's 1933 London and Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands receives a phone call from a boy saying he is his nephew, a teacher at his school has been murdered and he is responsible. Joe gets assigned to the case and finds that over the history of the school a large number of boys from wealthy families have disappeared and none of the families have followed up on their sons' whereabouts.

When the body of a young woman is found buried along the banks of the Thames in 1933, Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands juggles the case with an increasingly dangerous assignment protecting an American senator.

Joe Sandilands has been despatched to France to stay as the guest of a glamorous French war-widow on her Champagne estate. The widow is determined that Joe should support her claim that a mysterious shell-shocked soldier, suffering from amnesia and a loss of speech is her husband. The problem is that four other claimants have identified him differently, and his doctor suspects he is an English soldier. Joe decides to investigate the four claimants...

"Cambridge, October 1933. Inside the old All Hallows Church on All Hallows' Eve, Doctor Adelaide Hartest bears witness to the final moments of a dying stranger. Despite the dagger plunged into the stranger's chest, the death is ruled a suicide, compounded by a formal confession before death. The victim, it is revealed, is known to Scotland Yard, and Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands is sent all the way from London to investigate. Thrown into a...