1948. After serving with the French Resistance during the Second World War, codenamed La Chatte Noire, Phryne Fisher escaped to Australia in search of sunshine, butter, and peace. So she’s furious when tragedy intrudes upon her newfound tranquillity and she discovers a dead man on Somerton Beach – well-dressed, good-looking, and with a secret smile on his lips. The police are baffled as to his identity and cause of death – not to mention the scrap of paper bearing the words TAMAM SHUD found upon him, and the coded message in the book from which it was torn. But WPC Hammond knows Phryne’s fame as a detective. And Phryne telephones her old friend Bernard Cooper, who spent the war at a place called Bletchley, doing something awfully Top Secret involving codes...