Death in Ecstasy

It may hail from the "golden age" of the whodunit, but this 1936 tale contains enough of the dark secrets of a ritualistic cult and the hidden depths of London's drug world to satisfy any modern reader

Once again, Roderick Alleyn is on the case of a killer who plucked the life from the newest initiate of The House of the Sacred Flame, just as she was about to drink the sacrificial wine, being as it was laced with cyanide. In investigating her death he finds the High Priest and his followers are more enmeshed is the earthly passions of lust and jealousy than they would like to imagine.

Ngaio Marsh was born and educated in New Zealand. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female crime writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the 1920s and 1930s.