Kenneth Gibson is a poetry teacher, unmarried, fifty-five years old. He has a pleasant life. He has been through two wars--he was too old for Korea--but as a clerk, so no one knows how badly those horrors have affected him. He supported his widowed mother and put his sister through school. He has a good life and enjoys what he does.
Then he meets Rosemary. He meets her at the funeral of her father, his colleague. She seems so vulnerable that he volunteers to help her sort through her father's papers, in the hope there will be something publishable. There isn't. He offers to marry her--purely as a business proposition--and she agrees. They move into a house in the country.
Rosemary regains her health, and Mr. Gibson realizes he is in love with her. But on the way home from a restaurant dinner to celebrate her recovery, with Rosemary driving, they have an automobile accident. Only Mr. Gibson is hurt.
He telegraphs his sister Ethel to come and help them. And there the trouble begins.
Ethel takes over the place. It is she who decides what they eat, and what their schedule is. She is of the opinion that there are no accidents, that Rosemary crashed the car on purpose because she did not want to be married to Mr. Gibson, but preferred Paul, their next-door landlord, "as good as he is beautiful". She is so convincing that Mr. Gibson decides, rather than spend his life as a divorced and rather pathetic ex-husband living with his sister, he will commit suicide and solve everyone's problem.
He steals poison and pours it into a small olive oil bottle.
Yet somewhere between the laboratory and his home it vanishes.
That is the point at which the story truly begins. Rosemary comes home, and together they search for the bottle, picking up along the way a motley collection of colleagues and co conspirators.
There is really no way to describe this book, except to say it is like nothing else you ever have or ever will read.
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