Plot Summary
Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide. His first wife died; her sister Edith has cared for the household since then. Second wife indolent Brenda, decades his junior, exchanges love letters with grandchildren's tutor. After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended. Charles' father "The Old Man" is the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, so Charles investigates from the inside along with assigned detective, Chief Inspector Taverner. When sly Josephine suffers attack and Nanny is poisoned by hot chocolate after Brenda and the tutor are arrested, the danger escalates to a surprise finish.
Read more about this topic: Crooked House
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“There comes a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (18391894)