Christmas Eve of 1952, Daisy stumbled on a murder just being committed. She bumped into the culprit and the victim died in her arms. But at first the killer got away with it because the witness was blind. In 1986, during a stay in Zermatt with her old friend Beatrice, Daisy met him again, and that was when her “Pushkin Duel” finally came to a head.

In 1949 Daisy Hayes had a patient more or less her own age, Odile Speed, with whom she had a good rapport at once, and who told her about a strange kind of duel, interrupted for many years, from a short story by Pushkin.

Then on Christmas Eve of 1952 our blind sleuth extraordinaire stumbled on the scene of a murder just being committed. She bumped into the culprit and the victim died in her arms. The police interrogated her at once. But soon it became clear that the testimony of a blind witness was bound to be worthless in a court of law, the results of the coroner’s inquest were inconclusive at best, and it seemed that the murderer, whoever he was, would get away scot-free.

It was only in 1986, during a stay in Zermatt with her old friend Beatrice, that Daisy was confronted again with this ‘cold case’. She then experienced first-hand what it is like to fight your own version of a ‘Pushkin duel’ to the bitter end.

Nick Aaron is really a born storyteller. No one else would devise a plot combining a short story by Pushkin, the ‘discovery’ of DNA in 1953, and a very British scandal. Did solving a murder ever involve such a neat little package?