The second shot

Minton Deeps Farm is playing host to a weekend party led by mystery novelist John Hillyard. The evening's entertainment is a staged murder, played for laughs, but the real thing follows soon after. As the group walks back toward the house, Eric Scott Davies, the actor who was cast as the victim, lies dead after two gunshots ring out. Local police treat the death as murder, yet the person who summons Roger Sheringham from London is a member of the house party rather than the investigating officer, Superintendent Hancock. Sheringham finds a tangle of secrets, chances to act and competing reasons to kill, and the truth proves far more tangled than he first assumed.

Roger Sheringham is an amateur detective who appears in several of Anthony Berkeley's novels. Berkeley was one of the leading figures of the Golden Age of British detective fiction and a founder of the Detection Club, and this book is a country-house puzzle in that tradition.