It happens just before Christmas at St. Anselm's, the famous and fashionable Episcopal parish on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The Norwich Boy's Choir from England is expected shortly to join together with St. Anselm's own choir in a festival of Advent music. The rector's Christmas guest, a former dean of St. Paul's in London, has already arrived. Tragically, so has death, when the dean's lifeless body is discovered at the foot of the parish house stairs. Accident? No, because the dean's head has been crushed as by a savage blow. Reverend Claire Aldington and Lieutenant O'Neill barely have time to put their heads together when there is another brutal death, the very next day...