The lower middle class Ashton family of the city of Liverpool deal with life on the home front during the Second World War.

With the help of a feisty aristocratic woman, a working-class Scotland Yard inspector hunts for a serial killer of young women in Victorian London.

While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.