When she finds her beloved cats and some protected wildfowl dead of illegal poison, elderly Ursula Ottway threatens to expose her landlord, politician Marcus Grenville, as an anti-preservationist. Within hours, Ursula is dead . . . by the same illegal poison. Now, as George and Molly Palmer-Jones reconstruct Ursula's last days, it becomes clear that her sharp eyes and long memory had posed a deadly threat not only to Marcus, but to his chilly wife, his alienated offspring, and others. To bring a killer to justice, Molly and George must uproot a lifetime's worth of secrets and expose a nest of vicious human vultures.