On a gloomy December Sunday evening, disciples of a spiritual cult recently established in fashionable Belgravia (London) by the charismatic Jasper Garnette make their way through the pouring rain to The Temple of the Sacred Flame for an act of worship. In her Preface, the author thanks Robin Page 'for his advice on sodium cyanide', Guy Cotteril 'for his plan of the Temple', and Robin and Adamson 'for the friendly ingenuity in the preparation of household poisons'. Uncharacteristically, the novel dispenses with Marsh's usual introductory section establishing her characters, their relationships to each other and motives, plunging straight into journalist Nigel Bathgate's spur-of-the-moment attendance at The Temple of the Sacred Flame, where a sudden death takes place. According to Marsh's biographer Margaret Lewis, despite the author's conventional insistence that all the characters are fictitious, the book drew on an actual cult in 1890s Christchurch, NZ: Arthur Bentley Worthington's Temple of Truth. Discovering how the fatal prussic acid got into the wine is but one of the perplexing riddles that confronts Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn, when he is called upon to discover who poisoned this wealthy cult member.ĭeath in Ecstasy' centers around a dubious spiritual cult in fashionable 1930s London, with an even more suspect charismatic cult leader. When lovely Cara Quayne drops to the floor dead after drinking the ritual wine at the House of the Sacred Flame, she was having a religious experience of a sort unsuspected by the other initiates. Death in Ecstasy is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh, the fourth to feature her series detective, Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard.

Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh