Three men are found with their throats cut, and all are connected in some way to an ancient City of London livery company, the Silkworkers. Lord Powerscourt has no shortage of suspects or suspicions. The first victim had shadowy links with the Secret Service. The second had wiped fifteen years out of his own past. The third, a man who collected women at church during Christmas Carol services, had been threatened by angry husbands and disinherited sons. All the victims had been opposed to the reorganization of the Silkworkers' finances and, interestingly, Sir Peregrine Fishborne, the head of the Silkworkers, was present just before each victim's death. Lord knows that the key to solving the mystery lies in the strange markings found on the bodies, which no coroners can identify. From the Hardcover edition.

Includes supplements.

Originally published in 1976 Race and Suicide in South Africa synthesises the two dimensions of suicide: the personal and the social phenomenon. Its approach is Durkheimian in the use of court records, and phenomenological in the examination of actual cases. About 1500 cases of suicide in Durban from 1940-70 are analysed in terms of race, sex, occupation, marital status, economic status, family type and size, residential area, time and method used. What emerges is a revealing picture of suicide in South African ethnic groups. The findings confute the idea of Durkheim and others that behaviour in suicide conforms to certain universal principles and suggest the crucial role of particular social conditions in determining suicide trends, while at the same time challenging the proposition that a high suicide rate is associated with high status. Instead the author found that there were common emotional syndromes among suicides, but there were contributed to by different social factors.

Reproduction of the original: The Black Patch by Fergus Hume