"Literate and amusing, with exceptionally believable characters." ? - The New Yorker. A free-spirited widow travels to the Riviera, where she meets a lord, accepts his proposal of marriage, and returns with him to England. Bunny, now the wife of Sir Charles d'Estray, is mistress of a vast estate that's fallen into decline. To rescue the property from bankruptcy, Bunny introduces the successful but distasteful measure of accepting paying guests. In this atmosphere of deeply resented change, a poisonous plant has become the bitter brew of murder. And as a quarrelsome cast of d'Estrays, their servants and guests, and the mystified local police wander through a maze of mutual suspicion, Bunny finds herself not only the chief suspect but also a prime candidate for murder. "Told with a devastating detachment which is equally brutal toward the English gentry, its middle-class emulators, and upstart cockney detectives."? - The New York Times. AUTHOR: In addition to detective novels, Joanna Maxwell Cannan (1896 1961) wrote a series of children's books about horses and riding. The daughter of an Oxford dean, Cannan served as a nurse during World War I, married one of her soldier patients, and produced nearly a book a year from the 1920s onward.