For forty years, the Sloan Guaranty Trust has been administering the Schneider family trust. Now that the last of the Schneider siblings is dying, the heirs are pushing for a payout. All the ones that can be found, that is; black sheep grandson Robert came back from World war II and dropped out of sight, to everyone else’s relief. Sloan senior trust officer John Putnam Thatcher quickly learns that it would be very much in the family’s interest if Robert never reappeared.

Throw into the mix a love nest, an estranged wife, a pending and potentially highly lucrative stock offering, and a very convenient blizzard, and Thatcher is faced with a murder that none of the suspects could possibly have committed.

The first of Emma Lathen’s witty mysteries featuring elegant, urbane John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president and head of the trust department at Sloan (third largest bank in the world) and a formidable ferreter-out of financial - and other - secrets.