Bernard Woodruff should have known better than to expect anything but disaster from a visit to his wife's indolent but good-natured brother, Snooky. In a cabin in the Vermont woods, the irrepressible Snooky rhapsodizes about the simple pleasures of country living while preparing gourmet meals and falling in love with Sarah Tucker, a young woman whose family life is anything but simple. Bernard's depression at being away from home only deepens after he meets Sarah's assortment of relatives. There's a wealthy widowed aunt with a much younger admirer, an eccentric nature-loving spinster, a young photographer, and a blustering hunter, none of whom Bernard finds at all to his liking. But when Bernard never likes anyone, as his wife, Maya, keeps pointing out in an attempt to save Snooky's bruised feelings. Bernard is still grumbling when he stumbles on a corpse in the woods. It turns out to be the remains of the young man who had just become engaged to Sarah's rich...

While Maya suffers through morning sickness and Bernard paints the nursery a chocolate brown, Snooky becomes involved in a romance and mischief."You're pregnant, aren't you?" Maya Woodruff's peripatetic brother Snooky, calling collect from the French Antilles, makes this psychic diagnosis and instantly flies to Connecticut to offer a stuffed platypus, good cheer and gourmet cooking for the last seven months of his sister's ordeal. Her devoted, grumpy bear of a husband, Bernard, suffering his own labor pains from trying to deliver his latest children's book, is torn between his habitual hatred of all guests and his happy deliverance from the kitchen. (His coq au beer was not well received.) The misery of Maya's pregnancy, which makes the gestation of Rosemary's Baby look like a piece of cake, is compounded when her old friend Weezy becomes the target of an anonymous hate campaign by phone and mail. But Snooky takes charge with his usual...

Snooky Randolph and his brother-in-law Bernard set out to investigate the murder of a wealthy socialite.

When Laura Sloane, the host of a cocktail party, is found poisoned, nearly all of her guests become suspects.