I am going to kill a man. I don't know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him...

What do you do when you plan a murder then, inexplicably, your victim turns up dead, and not by your hand?

Respected crime writer Frank Cairns is plotting the perfect murder of George Rattery, the hit-and-run driver who killed his young son, but when his intended victim is found dead and Cairns becomes the prime suspect, the author insists he has been framed.

Pleading his innocence, an old friend calls in private detective Nigel Strangeways to help prove that Cairns has been framed. Strangeways must unravel a fiendishly plotted mystery if he is to discover what really happened to George Rattery.