Once again, Roderick Alleyn is on the case of a killer who plucked the life from the newest initiate of The House of the Sacred Flame, just as she was about to drink the sacrificial wine, being as it was laced with cyanide. In investigating her death he finds the High Priest and his followers are more enmeshed is the earthly passions of lust and jealousy than they would like to imagine. It may hail from the 'golden age' of the whodunit, but Ngaio Marsh's Death in Ecstasy contains enough of the dark secrets of a ritualistic cult and the hidden depths of London's drug world to satisfy the modern reader.