A Pocket Full of Rye

Rex Fortescue, the head of a London financial empire built on dealings that often skirt the edge of the law, collapses and dies after drinking his morning tea in his office. When the police examine the body, they discover a strange detail: a quantity of rye grain in the dead man's jacket pocket. Detective Inspector Neele takes charge of the investigation at Yewtree Lodge, the Fortescue family home, where a tyrannical patriarch has left behind a household of resentful relatives, a discontented young wife, and a staff with their own grievances. As further deaths follow, the killings begin to echo, detail by deliberate detail, the lines of an old nursery rhyme. Jane Marple arrives uninvited but determined, drawn into the case by a personal connection: a young maid in the Fortescue household had once been in her own service, and Marple feels a quiet obligation to see justice done. Working alongside the methodical Neele, she reads the family's tangled history, its buried secrets, and the meaning behind the rhyme that seems to govern the crimes. Beneath the orderly surface of a wealthy English home lie old wrongs and long memories, and Marple's understanding of human nature proves as valuable as any forensic clue in untangling who profits from the dead and why the murders take the shape they do.