A long-lost letter purporting to identify Jane Austen's hitherto unknown lover; the take-over of a building at the University of Calleshire by a group of students demanding the reinstatement of a recently suspended member of the left-wing Students' Direct Action Committee; a young student of ecology, murdered in the university quad, whose last words were "twenty-six minutes"--none of these seemingly unrelated items meant a thing to Inspector C. D. Sloan. But that was before another murder put matters in a somewhat different light and a search for clues put Inspector Sloan on a trail that led him to the discovery of the clue that made sense of a dying boy's last words--and set him in the right direction to prevent yet another murder.