Somebody had killed his father, then framed him. He knew who that somebody was, but how could he prove it?

Police Captain Bartholdi sometimes indulged himself in a harmless fantasy. His thoughts, he would imagine, were irresponsible imps that wriggled out of his head and scampered around with an abandon that was often embarrassing.

A woman had been kidnapped. That woman was dead.

Bartholdi was convinced that a murderer was at that moment having a grim laugh at his expense. He knew who the murderer was. He would have bet his pension and his sacred soul that he knew. But he could not, knowing, prove what he knew. He needed confirmation on one critical point.

From among his antic imps he culled the three that had directed his mind to its present state:

One newspaper too many.

A girl who slept too soundly.

And, most important of all, a ragout with too many onions.

John who? It all began simply enough, God knows. Mary Hazelwood suddenly decided to go away for the weekend and left a note for her sister Susie, with whom she shared an apartment, that she was off for Los Angeles and that John was driving her to the airport. It was only when she didn’t return that the problem arose.

John, obviously, had been the last person known to have seen Mary. But the difficulty was that Mary knew four different men named John, and each of them denied even having seen her that day.

Which John? Susie hadn’t a clue. And when she turned for help to a young professor named Mervyn Gray, who was half in love with her sister, he found a very disturbing warning in his mailbox. In block letters sprawling across a torn sheet of cheap note paper was this terse message — Confess or tomorrow you die!

Uncle Slater O’Shea was loaded.

Uncle Slater was supporting the lot of them — five freeloaders.

And in spite of liberal daily applications of whisky, Uncle Slater had his health.

He intended to keep it, so he had made a new will. So long as he continued to enjoy life, he would continue to maintain them. But the minute he died, his estate would be cut up among them, plus seventeen additional assorted O’Sheas. Cut up into twenty-two pieces, the freeloaders wouldn’t get enough from Uncle Slater O’Shea’s estate to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

Several weeks later, benevolently trailing a fragrant haze of good Irish whisky behind him, Uncle Slater went upstairs for a nip and a nap. He never came down. Which of them had been foolish enough to do the old boy in?

There are many ways to die; sometimes nature holds the most special ones.

At first it seemed as though only　The Madman Theory could explain the brutal shotgun slaying which lay in wait for the friendly group of back-packing hikers.

But Inspector Omar Collins, lean, gloomy-eyed, black-haired, was a painstaking man.

The more he pursued it, the less he believed in The Madman Theory.