Nest of Vipers
Chelion Piper has been arrested under suspicion of murder. One of the tenants of his country apartment house, an unsocial and secretive old lady named Miss Minnie, was found by Chelion and two other men in her bungalow, dead in her bed. Suicide or accidental death is quickly ruled out: the woman was drowned in sea water (her clothes and bed were wet), and her face was bludgeoned in. Dame Beatrice is called in to help him, and finds that the joke name 'Nest of Vipers' for the house is not far wrong.