In the sequel to Reservation for Murder, Mother Paul takes up a new position as warden of a student hall of residence at the University of Melbourne in the early 1960s. 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 a year earlier. Mother Paul is drawn to investigate what happened to Judith's sister - did she run off for reasons best known to herself, as the police concluded, or could she really have been murdered? Was her disappearance perhaps linked to a tragedy that occurred 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 somehow connected, and a further tragedy 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 figures on a chessboard until finally, amid high drama, the murderer is revealed.
