Jury investigates the death of a young escort who has been murdered behind a local pub. The only witness is the establishment's black cat, who gives neither crook nor clue as to the girl's identity or her killer's.

A spinster whose passion was bird-watching, a dotty peer who pinched pennies, and a baffling murder made the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place. And a severed finger made a ghastly clue in the killing that led local constables from a corpse to a boggy footpath to a beautiful lady's mansion. But Richard Jury refused, preferring to take the less traveled route to a slightly disreputable pub, the Anodyne Necklace. There, drinks all...

"In the latest series outing, The Knowledge, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa. Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand--a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied...

With his good friend Richard Jury on a fool's errand in Northern Ireland, Melrose Plant tries in vain to escape his aunt and his Long Piddleton lethargy by fleeing to Cornwall. There he rents a house furnished with tragic memories.

Richard Jury is intrigued by a woman traveling the Fulham road on a double-decker bus. He follows her to the gates of Fulham Palace, where he stops. He later wonders if the death in the Palace's walled garden could have been averted if he had gone in.