A few months after the Carlisle Detective Agency opened its doors, Lady Evelyn and her partner, Hugh, are twiddling their thumbs. The cases are slow to trickle in, leaving the detectives feeling uninspired. So, when Evelyn's Aunt Louise asks her to join the local chapter of the Women's Institute, she has no excuse to decline the invitation. Yet what she expects to be a tedious gathering, turns out to be anything but. She meets former suffragettes and outspoken women, eager for change, forcing Evelyn to reexamine her own prejudices. A decidedly less welcome surprise is the body she comes across only a few days later. Evelyn need hardly be a professional detective to recognize a murder when she sees one. Amid planning her wedding and navigating family affairs, she sets out to solve the case. The investigation takes Evelyn and Hugh into the past, examining the war years, which left the present far from untarnished. Is the victim's history connected to her death? Could her involvement in the war have given someone a motive for murder? The questions pile up, and Evelyn and Hugh must race against the clock to discover the truth, before more lives are lost, not least, their own.