In its first 80 years of activity, the Autonomous Institute for Social Housing (IACP) created in Rome a veritable "city within the city", to face what has always represented, and still represents, "the most serious problem facing Rome: the housing problem." What is this "city within the city" made of? Who is not included in their raw concrete? And how was this social architecture judged by the underprivileged men and women of the Roman people, active in the daily struggle for a house still to be expected, or too expensive to pay? First of all they teach those who are still in search of a house how to fight against and while waiting, but they also teach us that the fight for the right to housing is an unfinished struggle and therefore still recent, which is articulated and exhibited through the archives of the past and the archives of the present.

The lord and lady of a capacious manor are killed, and the lord's ghost seems to have returned to knock off the staff one by one, causing Inspector Winship and Dr. Tart to investigate the wacky house and its inhabitants.

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.