"On a French golf course, a millionaire is found stabbed in the back ... An urgent cry for help brings Poirot to France. But he arrives too late to save his client, whose brutally stabbed body now lies face downwards in a shallow grave on a golf course. But why is the dead man wearing his son's overcoat? And who was the impassioned love-letter in the pocket for? Before Poirot can answer these questions, the case is turned upside down by the discovery...

Val Darrant was just four years old the snowy night his mother abandoned him. But instead of meeting a lonely death, he met Will Reilly--a gentleman, a gambler, and a worldly, self taught scholar. For ten years they each were all the family the other had, traveling from dusty American boomtowns to the cities of Europe--until the day Reilly's luck ran out in a roar of gunfire. But it wasn't a gambling brawl or pack of thieves that sealed Will's fate....