Aspiring journalist and an Oxford-educated heiress, Ursula Marlow, who has a lot to learn about good detective work. Ursula's sheltered life begins to unravel after she receives a frantic late-night call from her friend Winifred Stanford-Jones, who's awakened to her lesbian lover's bloody corpse in her bed. Ursula summons Lord Oliver Wrotham, legal adviser to her industrialist father, but she bristles at the condescending, restrictive male power structure of Edwardian London and launches her own probe into the murder?with limited success.