When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the ‘Gaudy’, the prim academic environment is haunted with a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies and poison-pen characters – including one which says, ‘Ask the man you’re dating with the name if he likes arsenic in his soup.’ A number of the notes threaten murder and one of these involves a long Latin quotation, which makes Harriet think that the perpetrator is probably a member from the Senior Common Space. But which from the apparently rational, reputable dons could be committing such crazed functions? When a desperate undergraduate, at her wits’ end after receiving a series of particularly savage letters, attempts to drown herself, Harriet chooses that it is time to talk to Lord Peter Wimsey for help. And when the secret is finally solved, she is confronted with an agonising decision: should she, after five years of rejecting his proposals, finally consent to marry Lord Peter?