Armed men invade the Queen apartment. At their head is Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world's most powerful men. King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms, an industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill King, and Ellery must undertake to save his hated life. Virtual prisoners, Ellery and his father Inspector Queen are whisked away in a private plane to a mysterious island "somewhere in the Atlantic." In a frightening atmosphere of concentration camp, industrial slavery, and brute militarism, Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces not only the exact date of the assassination, but the exact hour and minute as well. He finds himself matching wits with the fascinating American-born King, handsome, cynical, an absolute monarch; with King's disturbing wife, Karla, from a European royal family; Abel, King's Prime Minister, of acute intelligence; and Judah, the saturnine little third brother with an inexhaustible thirst for expensive cognac. (cover)

"A preposterous story, told with the wealth of detail and characterization that Mr. Queen's admirers have come to expect."
Saturday Review

EQ takes on a political overtone here, and there's even a one-chapter trip back to Wrightsville for nostalgia. But there isn't too much mystery about whodunit--it's more a question of howdidhedoit.

In the King is Dead (1952), as in some of his later works, EQ also used searches for a different kind of puzzle plot. Here EQ conducts an in depth search among a dead man's clothing, looking for some item that never shows up, but which should have been there. The reader has to try to figure out which item is missing from the long list of clothing. Francis M.Nevins calls this approach the "negative clue". It was also noticed as an EQ trait by John Dickson Carr in his essay "The Greatest Game in the World" (1946), and delightfully burlesqued there. EQ was not the only author to use this approach; it also shows up frequently in Agatha Christie, for example in her novel Death in the Clouds (1935).