In this story Nero Wolfe investigates the murders of Eugene R. Poor, an inventor of novelties.

Ptomaine poisoning killed the heiress. Now their client can cozy up to the money. But there are too many beautiful women in the mansion, and the slimy little parasite is confused when he should be scared. After Archie Goodwin drops the ball, Nero Wolfe is ready to break a few laws — like extortion.

Cuando un poderoso representante gubernamental de la O.R.P. (Oficina de Regulación de Precios) está preparándose para hablar ante un grupo de millonarios pertenecientes a la A.I.N. (Asociación Industrial Nacional) muere asesinado. El mundo de los negocios se tambalea ante las sospechas vertidas sobre los magnates asistentes a la conferencia. La A.I.N. exige que se encuentre al asesino y Nero Wolfe decide hacerse cargo del caso.

A high-fashion designer consults Wolfe after she sees her uncle — believed to have committed suicide a year before — in disguise and in the audience at one of her shows.

The lady taxi-driver’s cab was parked in front of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone with a dead fare in the back seat. Someone chose Method Three for Murder.

In the newest full-length Nero Wolfe novel, crime ranges from embezzlement through murder to a great national scandal. At the outset, Nero and Archie undertake to find a man who has disappeared in New York — a man once accused of theft by his own father and now known to be innocent. Nero and Archie accomplish for the father what the Bureau of Missing Persons couldn’t: they locate the young man — but only to find him in ultimate peril. Meanwhile a national embezzlement on a heretofore unheard-of scale has attracted the interest of a Congressional committee. Nero, Archie, and various of Nero’s other assistants become deeply involved in both the peril and the scandal. Nero never had to think faster. Archie never had to act faster, than in this latest from the mystery master.

"Murder Is No Joke,” a workaday whodunit in a couturier’s salon, is a sample, par excellence, of the master’s inimitable ability to relate the unrelated — put the round peg in the square hole, so to speak — and nail two killings on one murderer.

The great detective was baffled by a misfit piece in the puzzle of a millionaire’s murder.

The U.S. army wants Nero Wolfe urgently, but the arrogant, gourmandizing, sedentary sleuth refuses the call to duty. It takes his perambulatory confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin, to titillate Wolfe’s taste for crime with two malevolent morsels: a corpse that won’t rest in peace and a sinister “accident” involving national security. So as Goodwin lays the bait on the wrong side of the law, Wolfe sets the traps to catch a pair of wily killers.

As a favor for his oldest friend Marko Vukcic, Nero Wolfe takes the case of Virgil Pompa, a chef who traded his genius for a high-paying job as the supervisor of a restaurant chain. He is in jail, charged with murder. Archie begins the story with the statement, "In my opinion it was one of Nero Wolfe's neatest jobs, and he never got a nickel for it."

It was the most distinguished group ever to gather in Nero Wolfe’s study: two of America’s foremost novelists, a world-famous playwright, and the heads of three great publishing houses.Somebody, or maybe a league of somebodies, was accusing America’s most celebrated living writers of plagiarism — and getting away with it.Nero had never encountered a case like this before — until the first body was found. And no other investigator could have cracked it, for the solution rested on determining who had written what manuscript, and this required an uncanny eye for literary style.With Nero tracking down nuances while Archie encounters more than his usual quota of cool-looking girls and much cooler corpses, with both of them up to their raised eyebrows in the world of best sellers, smash hits, and the people columnists stay up to quote, Plot It Yourself is one of the freshest, liveliest, wittiest Rex Stout novel ever to challenge a reader.

Nero Wolfe has always considered murder slightly illegal, but in the three stories in this volume It becomes something far worse — a personal affront. He is in fact, “ruffled beyond the bounds of tolerance” — three times For usually murder takes place at a decent distance from his presence, and now in succession violent death arrives (with the blinis and sour cream) at a dinner for gourmets attended by Wolfe himself, one body comes to the famous West 35th Street address by taxi, and a third murder takes place at a luncheon party where Nero and Archie have gone to partake of some blue grouse.Altogether, these three situations are really intolerable, and Wolfe is forced to work his brain even faster, and Archie’s feet and fists even harder, than ever before.Shapely blond, brunette, and titian cupbearers — in flowing robes — attend gourmets’ banquet cooked by Nero Wolfe’s own chef, in prelude to Poison à la Carte.