1876. The money-grubbing young barrister Charles Bravo marries a wealthy widow whose previous husband had died under suspicious circumstances. Charles Bravo turns out to be a wife-beater. When he winds up dead from antimony poisoning, suspicion falls on the wife. Others implicated include her long-time devoted lover Dr James Gully, her companion Mrs Cox and her former coachman whom the intemperate Charles had earlier sacked.

1909. The wealthy married industrialist George Harry Storrs has an affair with a Swiss Governess Maria Hohl. She ends up commiting suicide. Threatening letters appear against Storrs. He receives round-the-clock police protection. Storrs winds up dead anyway. Who killed him and why?

In the tight knit Methodist community in Peasenhall, a newly arrived young servant-girl, Rose Harsent begins a torrid affair with a married man and church reader. She is then found stabbed to death. It is revealed that she is pregnant. Was it her married lover, the jealous wife, a jealous boyfriend or some other aggrieved member of the community?

1929. Three members of a respectable middle-class family, all living along the same street, die one after the other. The first two deaths are incompetently put down to "natural causes" by the local quack. But the third starts to cause a scandal. Exhumations reveal arsenical poisoning in all three. Who among the remaining members or close associates was the murderer?

1941. The 22nd Earl of Erroll is found murdered with a bullet through the head along the Nairobi-Ngong road at the outbreak of WW2. Was it the the cuckolded Sir Jock Broughton who pulled the trigger, or his young social-climbing wife? Or was it one of the Earl's many ex-lovers or their aggrieved husbands? Or was the indiscreet Earl a victim of a political assasination by British authorities?