Plot introduction

Three generations of the Anglo-Greek Leonides family live together in a large, seemingly crooked house, under the patriarchy of Aristide. He is an ageing millionaire who originally moved to England from Smyrna and, in the novel, spends his remaining days in the company of his second wife Brenda, fifty years his junior. After the old man is poisoned with his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells her fiancé Charles Hayward, the story's first person narrator, that she can't marry him until the killer is apprehended; so, desperate for her hand in marriage, he begins his own investigation...