When a young woman is brutally murdered in a sleepy village in Dorset, it appears to have been a crime of passion and her killer is immediately arrested. But it is the identity of the victim, not the murderer, that brings Inspector Ian Rutledge down from Scotland Yard to investigate. For if the woman was indeed the killer s wife, then where are their children?

As a search gets under way, it becomes clear that the victim was someone else altogether. And still traumatised by his experiences in the Great War, Rutledge must sort through a tangled web of deception and twisted allegiances in order to discover which one of the emotionally scarred villagers is responsible for her death.