Isle of Wight, 1940: the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion answer a desperate letter from a frightened woman at a quiet farm near Godshill, where a blunt farmer dismisses his sister as hysterical, a pale young housekeeper is hated by everyone in the house for reasons no one will say aloud, and a latch in the gun room was opened in the night; when the farm's one honest man is shot dead in the lower meadow with a scrap of blue dress in his hand, the housekeeper's apron in the barn, and a fired shotgun in the neighbour's pigsty, the evidence points one way too quickly and too neatly — because the gun that killed him was not fired by a hand but fixed in a hedge, tied with a cord, and triggered by a basket filled with mushrooms no one had gathered, placed to lure a man who had seen too much; inspired by the real death of Frank Cave at Godshill (1940) while remaining entirely fictional, The Shot at Godshill is an original Golden Age–style mystery about staged evidence, farm rivalries, and the discovery that the most dangerous person on a quiet English farm is not the stranger but the man who has always been in charge.