It promised to be the perfect holiday with every modern convenience: exotic terraced gardens complete with an English folly, thirty-eight varieties of ice cream, and cocktails with names like 'Widow's Wink' and 'Mumbay Mule.' Antonia Darcy and Hugh Payne never seriously imagined they would encounter anything worse than extravagance in this idyllic setting.

But an uninvited guest at the garden party given in their honor makes Antonia his confidante. Not only does he claim to have witnessed the strangling of beautiful, wayward Marigold Leighton, he also insists it was their host Roman Songhera, the 'uncrowned King of Goa,' who had committed the murder.