A third collection of real-life murder cases, spread across the Midlands, from Birmingham and the Black Country to Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Cases date from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

We have an army captain, a country solicitor, an insurance salesman, a chauffeur, a doctor, a bus driver and a butler, linked by only one thing --- murder. We have deaths by gun, by hand, by poison, by fire and by the blade.

In more than twenty cases Barrie demonstrates the bizarre events that occur when one human being sets out to kill another, the strange ways in which the crimes are revealed or detected, and the consequences that follow.