Insp. John Appleby has his hands full. It begins when his aunt’s horse, Daffodil, disappears from her stable in Harrogate. Meanwhile, Appleby’s colleague, Superintendent Hudspith, is searching for a missing young woman by the name of Lucy Rideout. But the most bizarre case is the vanishing of a supposedly haunted house in Bloomsbury. Working together, the puzzled policemen soon find the cases are connected. But what exactly is going on? The answer to that question lies with a madman in the Amazonian jungle . . .