- "Love and death", said Chief Inspector Wexford. "Those were the only two sensational things that ever happened to Margaret Parsons, love and death. The thing is they both happened in my district."The police knew all about Margaret Parsons" life, and by the look of it, it was very dull. Margaret Parsons had been a "good woman". Religious, old-fashioned and respectable, her life had been as spotless and ordinary as her home, as unexciting and dependable as her marriage. But it was not Margaret Parsons" life that interested Wexford. It was her death. She had been a predictable, ordinary woman - but now she had met a death of passion and violence for which there seemed no motive or clue.