This note contains spoilers for the book.

This is actually the seventh Wolfe novel. And the red chair still isn't there. Lily Rowan appears for the first time, though. And Wolfe gets caught, while out of his house not on business (he's going to an exposition to show orchids; it turns out, to humiliate a competitor), in a murder investigation.

We also get a prize bull dead of anthrax; in fact a second prize bull. We get an issue of identity of the bull, too.