A baffling suicide, an anguished father searching for his missing daughter and the robbery of medieval treasures strain the talents of DC Endeavour Morse.
A murder investigation sends Endeavour and DI Thursday to a girls' school which is haunted by memories of an atrocity committed a hundred years earlier.
As a multiple murderer haunts the city strangling married women with a silk stocking, Endeavour and DI Thursday's emotional lives are turned upside down.
As 1966 draws to a close, the body of a disreputable journalist found in mysterious circumstances threatens to expose past horrors. As the investigation deepens, Endeavour and Thursday face corruption in Oxford's corridors of power.