Mother Paul, June Wright's beloved nun-detective, returns to her
sleuthing ways after she takes up a new position as warden of a student
hall of residence at the University of Melbourne. No sooner has Judith
Mornane arrived on campus than she startles her fellow residents by
announcing her intention to discover the murderer of her sister, who
disappeared from the same dorm a year earlier. The ever-curious Mother
Paul is drawn to investigate what happened to Judith's sister--did she
simply run off for reasons best known to herself, as the police
concluded, or could it be she really was murdered? Was her disappearance
perhaps linked to a tragedy that happened at around the same time--the
accidental drowning (in her bathtub) of the wife of one of the college's
professors? Was that drowning in fact as accidental as the official
investigation suggested? Mother Paul believes the two events are
connected somehow, and a further tragedy, the faked-suicide death of one
of her student charges, convinces her that a particularly cruel and
clever murderer is still at work within the college. She is not above a
little subterfuge in the interest of discovering the truth and moves her
colleagues, the students, and even the police around like so many
figures on a chessboard until finally, amid high drama, the murderer is
revealed.
