A round of golf at a Welsh seaside resort takes a grim turn when Bobby Jones, the easygoing fourth son of the vicar of Marchbolt, slices a ball over a cliff and discovers a man broken on the rocks below. The stranger lives just long enough to murmur a single baffling question before he dies, and that question lodges itself in Bobby's mind. When an inquest swiftly closes the matter as an accident, Bobby is inclined to let it rest, until an attempt is made on his own life and the loose threads refuse to lie flat. Joined by his spirited childhood friend Lady Frances Derwent, known to everyone as Frankie, he sets out to make sense of the dying words and the curious people who seem connected to them. The two adopt disguises, stage a motor accident to gain entry to a suspicious household, and trade quick banter as the stakes climb from idle curiosity toward genuine peril. Wit and recklessness carry them where caution would not, and their amateur sleuthing brushes against forces far more dangerous than either anticipated. Working without a famous detective to guide them, Bobby and Frankie must rely on nerve, luck, and each other. Set among country houses, a nursing home, and the cliffs of the Welsh coast, the story moves at a brisk pace, balancing genuine menace with a light, conversational charm and a puzzle that keeps circling back to one teasing question.
