Great Stapleton, a small country town in the South of England, is not much bigger than a village. It is not the kind of place where people are murdered. So when the postman comes into the police station one morning to tell the police that Colonel Townsend has been murdered, Inspector Chapman thinks he is joking. When he sees the body, he knows that this is no joke. As he starts his investigation, he quickly discovers that there is a lot more going on in Great Stapleton then he had imagined...