There's a storm, and strangers are gathered in one place.
Someone is killed, and it's apparent that one of the guests is the murderer.
If the play had a butler, you can rest assured he'd be the murderer. Nonetheless, to an audience that has seen countless quaint old murder mysteries, the conventions of the genre may seem a bit dated, regardless of whether they were fresh or not when the play was written. Several guests arrive just as a blizzard sets in, with news of a murder having just occurred in town. Seems that years ago, three young children were taken from their parents and sent to a foster home that proved to be abusive and neglectful. If the script calls for her to seem unsettled, director John Adams ought to have helped Benson find a more subtle way of expressing it.