"I can't remember a case with so many motives," Emmy remarks to her husband, Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. "Hauser must have been just about the most hated man in Europe." The Tibbetts are at a small resort in the Italian Tirol for a spot of skiing and to look into a little matter of interest to Interpol. The "most hated man in Europe" is Fritiz Hauser, a fat, odious little man who is a frequent visitor to the lodge, although he does not ski. The lodge itself is located high above a small village and is reachable only via the longest chair-lift in Europe. It is on that chair-lift that Hauser's body is discovered with a bullet through his heart. Just about all the guests at the resort had reason to want Hauser dead, including a group of youngish Brits, the blustery Col. Buckfast and his ever complaining wife, a lovely but unhappy Baroness, her husband, a dark, young sculptor from Rome, and a German nanny. Even the staff is not beyond suspicion. An Italian policeman is in charge and he does a marvelous job of compiling timetables but it's up to Henry's intuitive police work, what he calls his "nose," that finally reveals whodunit. Published in 1959, this would be the first of nineteen books in which the Tibbetts solve crimes in various locales around the globe. As Katherine Hall Page says in her introduction, Moyes worked in the grand tradition of the Golden Age detective novel.

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