''The Lying voices'' were the clocks that filled the room where Arnold Thaine was shot dead. They ticked in a hundred different rhythms but every single one was wrong. So the fact that a bullet had stopped one of them gave no clue to the time of his murder . . .

On the day of Thaine's death, Justin Emery was visiting his old friend Grace DeLong, who had been to visit Thaine that morning. But who was the woman in the brown mackintosh who had entered Thaine's study? Who were the other two visitors? And was anything to be learned from the broken clock?