Philip Cruikshank is in his pajamas in the garage of his comfortable Abbotsburn home. He is also, unfortunately, dangling from the end of a rope. Cruikshank's hanging looks suspicious, and his common-law wife, a promiscuous nightclub singer whom he has recently jilted, is nowhere to be found. Worse yet, the irritable Detective Superintendent George Rogers must fence with an ex-lover and with the new woman detective on his team, even while conducting his own amorous investigation of the elegant widow Angharad Rhys Pritchard.