When a series of "accidents" befalls both animals and humans in the village of Ashdown Dean, Superintendent Richard Jury, his aristocratic assistant, Melrose Plant, the local police, and a fifteen-year-old animal lover join the search for a killer.

Saturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Saturday night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise hell with, Saturday night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn't want to be seen alone on a Saturday night…. Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

"In the latest series outing, The Knowledge, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa. Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand--a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied...

Following a passionate and troubled love affair with a pretty widow named Jane Holdsworth, Jury finds himself, unaccountably, a suspect in a murder investigation. Detained in London, Jury sends his friend Melrose Plant, former Earl of Caverness, to the Holdsworth family's Lake District home to pose as an eccentric librarian. Plant discovers that his catalogue cards contain less data on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey than they do on tantalizing...

When a dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique secretaire a abattant, Marshall Trueblood, recipient of the precious piece of furniture, is the first to protest: "I bought the desk, not the body, send it back." Who would want to kill Simon Lean, the greedy nephew of the wealthy Lady Summerston? Leave it to Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard to suggest a connection to the murder of brassy Limehouse lady named Sadie Driver,...

Superintendent Jury, Melrose Plant, Wiggins, and Police Chief Macalvie gather in Devon at an out-of-the-way pub to connect a twenty-year-old murder with a series of recent killings.

In the tenth murderous case for Richard Jury, the New Scotland Yard superintendent witnesses a killing in a West Yorkshire inn called the Old Silent, while his highborn, amateur colleague, Melrose Plant wishes to he could perform one as he drives his impossible Aunt Agatha to the Old Swan in Harrogate. Caught up in a triple murder, Jury would go to any lengths to help Nell Healey, the lovely widow of one of the victims. But Nell Healey remains silent...

Richard Jury considers the authenticity of a fantastical tale, told by a stranger and fellow patron at the Old Wine Shades pub in London, about a string theory scientist's wife, son, and dog, who disappeared without a trace nine months earlier.