It all began one day when two beautiful "females" as Archie called them, arrived in Nero Wolfe's. office with a problem Wolfe didn't want to touch. He did touch it though when there was murder in the fencing academy in which the girls worked as instructresses, and when the affair began to take on international complications. Wolfe was tracking down more than murder when he tried to discover who had removed the col de mort from the glass case in the fencing salon. - Summary by Inside cover of novel