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.

The murder is in America, but the call goes out to Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury. Accompanied by his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant and by Sergeant Wiggins, Jury arrives in Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, and Edgar Allen Poe. In his efforts to solve the case, Jury rubs elbows with a delicious and suspicious cast of characters, embarking on a trail that leads to a unique tavern called The Horse You Came in On.

Detective Richard Jury is back in the 16th novel in Martha Grimes' extraordinary New York Times best-selling series - now enmeshed in a series of strange crimes and disappearances and an age-old tragedy that consumes his sidekick, Melrose Plant....

The Dirty Duck is a pub in Shakespeare's beloved Stratford, and in this pub Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, fresh from a performance of As You Like It, takes her last drink. A few minutes later she is slashed ear to ear, the only clue: two lines from an unknown poem printed across a theater program. And Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury, just passing through Stratford for a glimpse of the intriguing Lady Kennington, instead takes a crash course in the bloodier side of Elizabethan verse.

When the body of a French woman washes up on a wild inlet off the Cornish coast, Brian Macalvie, the divisional commander with the Devon-Cornwall police, is called in. Who could have killed this beautiful tourist when the only visible footprints nearby belong to the two little girls who found her? While Macalvie stands stumped in the Scilly Islands, inspector Richard Jury - 20 miles away on Land’s End - is at the Old Success pub, sharing a drink with the legendary former CID detective Tom Brownell, a man renowned for solving every case he undertook - well, nearly every case....