After his young son is run down and killed by a speeding car in the
Gloucestershire village where he lives, mystery novelist Frank Cairnes is angry when the police fail to trace the culprit. For some time, he has been planning to murder the man responsible as soon as he has the opportunity, whatever the consequences. Deciding to investigate on his own, he finds out by chance that the passenger in the car is a rising film actress, Lena Lawson. Pretending to be writing a new novel set in a
film studio, he meets Lena in
London posing under his pen name Felix Lane. After a courtship, he manages to gain an invitation to stay with her at the house of her brother-in-law George Rattery in Gloucestershire. Now certain that Rattery, a wealthy and unpleasant bully, is the man who killed his son, Cairnes plots his revenge. After discovering that Rattery cannot swim, he goads him into coming
sailing with him on a stormy day. Complications ensue and the plan goes awry, Rattery able to walk away in apparent triumph. Only a few hours later, however, he collapses after dinner and dies almost instantly of
poison. Knowing that he will be the prime suspect, Cairnes calls in the private detective Nigel Strangeways to clear him of the murder. ==Adaptations==