What murdering fiend is setting the fires at Fitch’s Folly, leaving behind in their smoldering ashes the ghastly mortal remains of slain human souls?

Fitch’s Folly is the New England summer home of Peter Finch, that elderly and eccentric New York millionaire who in season lords it over the little village of Vershire. The querulous old man insisted there was a dastardly plot afoot against him, but no one took him seriously–not, that is, until frightful infernos began to blaze and bodies pile up all over his sprawling estate! It was then that burning suspicions began to rage far and wide among Finch’s numerous dependents and servitors, many of them first-rate oddities in their own right. Finch’s pyrophobic chauffeur, Bill Perley, narrates the bizarre and baffling events which take place during that terrible July, as his old army pal, Vershire Police Chief Larry Frost, desperately tries to extinguish what truly is one hellish conflagration of crime.