High in the Mid-Yorkshire dales stands the village of Enscombe, pretty as a picture and proud survivor of all that history and nature have been able to throw at it. But now market forces mass at the gates, developers undermine The Green, the walls of the hall have been breached by tourists, an estate agent's blazon flies over the vicarage, and the school is making its last desperate stand.
Against these crimes the law offers little defense. But when a policeman is reported missing, leaving only a handful of bizarre clues, DCI Peter Pascoe gets worried. Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel thinks he's just overreacting - until the normally phlegmatic Sergeant Wield also shows signs of changing his first impressions of village life.
Over two eventful days a new pattern emerges, of lust and lying, of family feuds and ancient injuries, of frustrated desires and unbalanced minds. Finally, inevitably, everything comes to a bloody climax at the Squire's Reckoning, where the villagers gather each Lady Day to feast and gossip and pay old debts. Not even the presence of the Mid-Yorkshire CID trio can change the course of history, though one of them is to find the course of his own personal history changed forever.