I have arrived, said the note. Louise Leidner claimed the writer had followed her halfway around the world and was now coming to kill her. But the others on the dig in Iraq thought the archeologist's wife was suffering from hysteria...until she was found bludgeoned in her bedroom. Local police, baffled by the variety of suspects, each with a motive, call on the assistance of a Belgian detective of some renown who is on his way to Baghdad - Hercule Poirot.