Scales of Justice is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh. it is the eighteenth novel to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published in 1955. With a classic 'Golden Age' crime novel's setting, in the idyllic, self-contained, rural English community of Swevenings, the suspects all members of a tight-knit social group revolving around the local baronet and his family (the Lacklanders), the plot concerns the brutal murder of Colonel Carterette, an enthusiastic fisherman, who is preparing for publication the deceased squire's memoirs, which include the admission that as a high-ranking diplomat before World War Two, the baronet had treasonably put class before country in what has been called the Herrenvolk heresy, and knowingly let a young member of the embassy staff take the blame. The young