Wealthy Richard Abernethie dies suddenly at his country house, and his scattered relatives reconvene for the funeral and the reading of his will. The mood of dutiful grief curdles when his eccentric younger sister, Cora Lansquenet, looks around the gathering and remarks that her brother was murdered, wasn't he. The others dismiss the outburst as tactless nonsense, but the next day Cora is found hacked to death with a hatchet in her cottage. The unsettling coincidence convinces the family solicitor, Mr Entwhistle, that her careless words touched something real, and he quietly begins sounding out the heirs about where each of them was when she died. Every relative had reason to want the inheritance, and several had cause to fear what Cora might have known. When the solicitor's amateur probing reaches its limits, he turns to Hercule Poirot, who arrives among the suspects under an assumed name and a borrowed purpose. Working through small inconsistencies in memory, manner, and appearance, Poirot tests the assumption that the killing was about money at all. The investigation moves between a fading family seat and the cramped lives of its inheritors, weighing old resentments, financial desperation, and the question of whether anyone truly looks the way others remember them. The puzzle turns on observation rather than action, building toward a solution that reframes the offhand question that started everything.