When the mutilated body of midwife and healer Agatha Kyteler is discovered in a hedge one frozen wintry morning, it seems at first that a lack of clues will render the crime impossible to solve. Then a frightened local youth inexplicably flees his village, and a hue and cry is raised in his wake.
Sir Baldwin Furnshill, once a Knight Templar, has doubts about the boy's guilt. He enlists his friend Simon Puttock, bailiff of Lydford Castle, in the hunt for a murderer. But what they seek lies somewhere on the darker side of Wefford, beneath layers of jealousy, suspicion, and hatred - and the buried truth could prove fatal to anyone who disturbs it.
