Roger is especially eager to jump to the conclusion since he thinks Brenda to be a gold-digger. However, the other members of the family suspect Brenda of murdering her husband since she administered the insulin injection. Moreover, she is an expert in toxicology and has the grey matter necessary to pull off the murder. Hiss wife, Clemency, despised Roger living under the umbrella of his father, and she may have killed Aristide. Philip and Magda have a grudge against Aristide since he did not fund Magda’s prospective production ‘Exposure.’ His other son, Roger, presumably needed his father’s money at regular intervals. All of them have good motives to kill the patriarch of the family since they seek to inherit some of the immense wealth of Aristide. As Charles’ rigorous interrogation of the Leonides family members helps him deduce, anyone can be the killer. Sophia thinks that the insulin injection was laced with an agent called eserine, which was present in Aristide’s eye drops. The doctors discover that he had a heart attack in his sleep.

Sophia finds Aristide dead in his bedroom. Crooked House Ending: Who Killed Aristide Leonides? The story deepens with another casualty in the house. Brown, the private tutor of the Leonides students. Aristide’s second wife, Brenda, takes the fall for Aristide’s death due to her promiscuous nature. Then there is Lady Edith, the unmarried sister of Aristide’s first wife, the matriarch of the house.

Aristide’s younger son, Roger, is the owner of a failing family business. Philip and Magda have three children: Sophia is the eldest, Eustace, the communist, and Josephine, the youngest of them all, who has a penchant for detective stories. As he probes into the story, he knows that Greek-English oligarch Aristide had many enemies, and the most bitter of them were his nearest ones.Īristide’s eldest son, Philip, is a historian, and his wife, Magda, an actress with little success. Considering their previous acquaintance, Charles reluctantly takes up the case. Sophia suspects foul play and thus pleads with Charles to take up the case.

They haven’t spoken much after their supposed stint in Cairo, but now, her grandfather Aristide Leonides is dead. Sophia de Haviland (Leonides) comes to meet her past fling and presently private investigator Charles Hayward.

Crooked house plot