In the fifteenth Henry Gamadge mystery, Elizabeth Daly presents one of her most ingenious puzzles. The urbane sleuth is drawn into a case not by a phone call or a letter, but by a typo in a crossword puzzle. Mrs. Coldfield, a widow effectively imprisoned in her own home by her controlling family, manages to slip a desperate coded message for help into a puzzle she created for a local paper. Gamadge, recognizing the cry for help, enters the gloomy Coldfield household to find a family clinging to Victorian secrets and a situation ripe for murder. He must decode the silence of a terrified woman and expose a killer who believes they can control everyone around them.