What motive, if any, linked the brutal murder of Violet Casterbrook, the wife of the headmaster of Love Street School, on the morning of the 17 December 1962, her bludgeoned body left for dead on the snow-covered terrace of their riverside home and the two murders that soon after followed hers, two of his pupils? A teenage girl intoxicated with youth, beauty, and thoughts of her first love and a harmlessly silly, much bullied boy, the butt of so many unkind jokes, each known to the other but not friends. No, never friends. Or the two murders that preceded these. One, in the days before Violet's death, the other a decade earlier. The former, a vivaciously attractive young woman with no connection to the school, a murder, which, when discovered, was horribly reminiscent of the sadomasochistic murder in colonial Hong Kong of a beautiful and highly respectable Chinese lady killed on the holiday island of Cheung Chau. Murders that challenged the combined resources of Chief Inspector Tomon Hughes and his retired, onetime army CO., ex MI6/SIS Officer Aubrey Alfred Dent, AA to his trusted friends, to quickly solve.