The MP found in a wool bale
In wartime New Zealand, Flossie Rubrick, a forceful local MP, disappears from Mount Moon, her husband's remote high-country sheep station, and is found weeks later pressed inside a bale of the station's own wool. More than a year afterwards Inspector Alleyn is sent, partly because secret military research has been carried out on the station and espionage is suspected, to reconstruct a crime whose physical scene has long since been cleaned, shorn and shipped. The case becomes a test of whether a stale killing can be solved almost entirely through what the survivors remember and how they tell it.