"1923- Five Cambridge college dons host a monthly dinner club in secret. Their sixth man, always a stranger, is destined to make only one appearance. He is carefully selected the day of each party as the dons scour the streets to find their next target-a vagrant, perhaps, who looks like he could use a nice meal. He is handed a formal invitation, then appears at dinner only to be psychologically tormented for the evening by the dons' cutting wit. The man with the highest number of killing shots is awarded a cup at the end of the night. Then the dons' most recent guest, a former officer in the turn-of-the-century Boer War, is found strangled with hints of a sumptuous last meal in his stomach. Detective Inspector John Redfyre's investigation takes him into the halls of notoriously elite and secretive St. Jude's College-unfamiliar territory, even for a man of his breeding. As he contends with five suspects, each powerful and formidably clever, he must determine whether their parties are merely pretentious sadism, or one or more of the dons has more sinister mechanisms at play"--