The fat hardware dealer married the fat and ugly widow within two weeks of the time his partner died and moved into her home where they might have lived brutishly ever after with her fat, ugly daughter without the intervention of editor/reporter Dave Halliday of the Connecticut Review. He has to dip his ready pen in poison to shake them up and finish the case . It's a little like a hyperactive TV mystery hour and it takes, minus the commercial time, about that long to read.