When the mutilated body of midwife and healer Agatha Kyteler is discovered in a hedge one frozen wintry morning, it first appears the lack of clues will render the crimes unsolvable—until a frightened local youth inexplicably flees his village and a hue and cry is raised. Sir Baldwin Furnshill, however, has doubts about the boy's guilt and enlists friend and bailiff of Lydford Castle, Simon Puttock, in the hunt for the murderer. But what they seek lies somewhere on the darker side of the village of Wefford, beneath layers of jealousy, suspicion, and hatred—and the buried truth could prove fatal to anyone who disturbs it.