One winter's night, bookseller Delaney Nichols and her coworker Hamlet are invited to a Burns Night dinner, a traditional Scottish celebration of the poet Robert Burns. The dinner takes place at Burns House itself, a tiny cottage not far from the Cracked Spine bookshop. There, they learn of a longstanding feud between Edwin, Delaney's boss, and one of the other invitees, who suspected Edwin for burning down his own bookshop twenty years ago. But after the dinner, there's another fire. The Burns House itself is burned to the ground, and this time there's a body among the ruins. When Hamlet is accused of the crime, Delaney rushes to prove his innocence, only to discover that he might actually have a plausible motive...