A retired academic returns to some of his childhood haunts and makes the grim discovery of four corpses, all members of the same family, all murdered. Suspicion soon falls on the one surviving family member but, as DCI Hennessey and DS Yellich delve further into the case, they unravel the story of a family which has fallen from grace with the peerage, and discover a strange, remote, inward-looking village in the vale of York with its own secrets and intrigue hidden behind its placid facade. A fortune is found in an attic just as help arrives from an unexpected source--and does so in the nick of time...