Phil Hearne

Napoleon, exiled, devises a plan to retake the throne. He'll swap places with commoner Eugene Lenormand, sneak into Paris, then Lenormand will reveal himself and Napoleon will regain his throne. Things don't go at all well; first, the journey proves more difficult than expected, but more disastrously, Lenormand enjoys himself too much to reveal the deception. Napoleon adjusts somewhat uneasily to the life of a commoner while waiting, while Lenormand gorges on rich food.

The 20 January 1931 slaying of Julia Wallace remains unsolved, despite an ongoing stream of investigative writers giving an impression that a solution to the crime has been found through a surfeit of working hypotheses.