Murder is afoot is the sedate English town of Royal Tunbridge Wells and the crime may be brewing in a tea pot! Nigel Owen is having a rotten year. Downsized from a cushy management job at an insurance company in London, he is forced to accept a temporary post as managing director of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum. Alas, he regrets living in a small city in Kent, he prefers drinking coffee (with a vengeance), and he roundly dislikes Flick Adams, PhD, an American scientist recently named the museums curator. But then, the wildly unexpected happens. Dame Elspeth Hawker, the museums chief benefactor, keels over a board meeting the apparent victim of a fatal heart attack. With the Dames demise, the museums world-famous collection is up for grabs, her cats, dog, and parrot are living at with Flick and Nigel and the two prima donnas find themselves facing professional ruin. But Flick who knows a thing or two about forensic science is convinced that Dame Elspeth did not die a natural death. As Flick and Nigel follow the clues including a cryptic Biblical citation they discover that a crime perpetrated more than a century ago sowed the seeds for a contemporary murder.

Etienne Makepeace, England's celebrated "Tea Sage," vanished without a trace in 1966, leaving the whole of Great Britain wondering what became of the famed radio personality. Forty years later his hastily buried remains are discovered beneath two sickly Assam tea bushes in the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum's tea garden--"along with the pistol that killed him. Nigel Owens, curator, and Flick Adams, tea chemist, are thus embroiled in the second mystery to threaten the integrity of the museum. Are they in over their heads this time?