James Tarrant's position as an assistant chemist in a sleepy village backwater does not satisfy his craving for wealth. The infatuated Merle Weir, a nurse at a local convalescent home, agrees to help him in a not-quite-legal scheme to sell their own indigestion remedy on the back of another's reputation. When Tarrant breaks his promise and becomes engaged to another, Merle talks of revenge. Could she really have murdered her partner in crime? Inspector French investigates. Freeman Wills Crofts was born in Dublin and worked in railway engineering before turning to detective fiction. To his plots he brought a mind trained in mathematics, specialising in the seemingly unbreakable alibi and transport timetables. His best-known character is Inspector Joseph French, who appears for the first time in Inspector French's Greatest Case. French achieves his results through dogged persistence. Raymond Chandler praised Crofts' plots, calling him 'the soundest builder of them all'.