Julian Radclive is hosting a dinner for The Unspeakables, the group of friends who attended Latimer College with him in his youth. They have started to meet again at intervals, this time in the Oxfordshire village where Julian and his wife Gaby live. One of the group is murdered at breakfast on the morning after the dinner and another is run over in London when they meet again several months later for the...

Julian Radclive is hosting a dinner for The Unspeakables, the group of friends who attended Latimer College with him in his youth. They have started to meet again at intervals, this time in the Oxfordshire village where Julian and his wife Gaby live. One of the group is murdered at breakfast on the morning after the dinner and another is run over in London when they meet again several months later for the University Boat Race. Meantime, a Hollywood movie studio is planning a new TV detective drama in Oxford and Julian Radclive is commissioned to write the script for the pilot episode. While Julian and Gaby enter the unfamiliar world of movie-making and encounter some exotic characters, the Master of Latimer engages with a Chinese university for a student exchange programme and invites Julian and two of his friends to join the candidate selection board. They interview students in Latimer on the same day as the next dinner of The Unspeakables, this time in College, and one of their number is murdered immediately afterwards. All the strands in the story come together in the investigations which follow when Julian finally unmasks the killer.