A hotel inspector is found dead in a locked room. One unlikely detective is going to have to magic up a solution.

When Barry Holt, short, balding, comprehensively unsuited to a cape and top hat, and entirely happy about all three, arrives at The Beaumont Hotel on the south Devon coast to perform his vanishing cabinet routine, the closest thing to drama he is expecting is the wedding rehearsal. Then a guest in Room Eleven turns up dead behind what everyone agrees is a locked door.

The local police see an impossible crime. Barry, who spends his evenings persuading paying audiences that a sealed cabinet is sealed, sees a magic trick. His wife Helena, called in to fix the hotel's finances, is finding cooked books to match.