When Silas Beadnall arranges a dinner party at the Kularook Hotel for his sixtieth birthday, he gathers together an ill-assorted group of people who could be called his nearest and dearest - but some of them have other ideas about that. Old jealousies are reignited, old grievances remembered. His grown-up farmer sons and their wives, his daughter, his sisters, and his estranged grandson - to say nothing of old friends and neighbours - all, for differing reasons, do not wish him well on this anniversary. Mounted Constable Bowler Brown, local policeman, watches and listens. And what secrets is the dowdy new housemaid at the hotel hiding?