Is she dead too?

It was lovely Margaret Reeve who told Arthur Crook about the strange happenings in the Poulden household. Edwin Poulden, druggist in a small English village, lost his wife very suddenly following a bilious attack after a meal of mushrooms. Six months after that dreadful occurrence, Blanche Bannerman, an elderly paying guest in the Poulden home, took sick and, in Poulden's words, was unconscious. But young Patsy, Poulden's ward, overheard him talking to Miss Bannerman about terms he could not meet. That same night, when Margaret stopped in Miss Bannerman's room to see how she was feeling, Patsy's pet cat came tearing out of the room. A little while later Miss Bannerman was found lying dead on the floor. The inquest established Miss Bannerman's death as the combined effect of a terrible scare from the cat that she detested and a concussion caused by a fall. But two sudden deaths in the Poulden household in the space of six months seemed too coincidental to the sleuthing genius of Arthur Crook. Things got far beyond what he thought was in store for him when, in his little red sports car, he decided to find out if this might be a question of murder.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.