Was it simply, in the coroner's words, a stupid and tragic accident?

Sybil Crawfurd would never have expected her brother, Hugo, to die like that, so suddenly, in a fall from the balcony of a Brighton hotel . . .

The handsome, intelligent headmistress of a girls' school on the south coast, Sybil is not alone in desperately wanting 'but two hours converse with the dead'. Lavinia Trent, the well-known actress, and Bridget Nagel, whose journalist husband was killed in the Falklands, are equally ready to enter the bizarre, comic, unnerving world of paranormal experiment . . .