Young Richard Scroby didn’t intend to make a fuss when the burglar broke into his apartment. After all, that’s why he kept a very competent manservant about. But Wilkins was out of town and Richard was a little the worse for drink, so when he spotted the crook at his window, he picked up a perfectly awful vase—a gift from his very formidable Aunt Angela—and with one well-aimed blow sent this second-story man crashing to the pavement. After which Richard promptly went to bed. Needless to say, he was more than a bit perturbed when the police came calling quite early that morning to ask about the man in the street. To Aunt Angela this escapade was the last straw, and she announced that it was time she found Richard a wife. “Who needs a wife when you’ve got a perfectly good servant?” Richard quite reasonably asked himself and, with Wilkins’ aid, fled to Paris. Unfortunately, the confederates of the incarcerated burglar are also in Paris and, unknown to Richard, are out to make sure he doesn’t testify in court. Nor does it take Aunt Angela long to track down her vanished nephew. Which is why two gentlemanly spirits, James and Charles Latimer, who were killed some eighty years earlier in an ill-conceived piece of bravado during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, are back again among the quick. Whenever a relative is in danger—and nearby—these two are allowed to return to the world of the living and use their unique talents to right wrongs.  Coming along for the ride is their pet monkey Ulysses, whose love of claret spells trouble for a troupe of scantily clad trapeze artists. First published in 1958, this is the third and final book featuring the ghostly Latimers, by the creators of the Tommy Hambledon spy novels.

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