Mr Gabb, your son did not commit suicide. He was murdered.'

Simon Gabb has everything - or so it seems: a beautiful house on a large estate, a flourishing business and two sons, both evidently endowed with the capacity to carry on the family firm. One is brilliant and inventive, the other dependable and efficient. And yet something is manifestly wrong. A secret invention, on which his business is engaged for the government, becomes known to those who have no right to such information. But how and where did the leak occur? It is a conundrum which creates suspicion and dissension within the family and engulfs everyone who dines with them one Saturday night. The next morning, Gabb's elder son, Giles, who, despite his oddities of behaviour, has shown such promise, is found dead by the lake. Smouldering emotions at once flare up, further deepening the mystery that Inspector Mallett must unravel.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman (1897-1959), a classical scholar who taught Greek at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff. Beginning in 1937, Freeman wrote twenty-nine mysteries and a number of short stories as Mary Fitt, and was elected to the Detection Club in 1950. Aside from her detective novels, Freeman published many books on classical Greece, scholarly articles and children's stories. She lived in St Mellons in Wales with her partner Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet, a family physician and author.