It is January 1940 and Mrs Mudge is busily occupied cleaning the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics society. But she’s in for an unpleasant surprise with her discovery of a corpse in the box-office, stabbed in the back with a dagger – a prop from the society’s latest play, Measure for Measure.

Readers will have to wait until the half-way stage of this wonderful detective story before the identity of the corpse is revealed. After which it becomes clear that there were many people who had reason to be in the theatre late that night . . .