On a wild March night, as an icy gale tears across the northern meadows, a man returns to a remote farmhouse and finds a woman shot dead at the kitchen table. She was a stranger to the village-a divorcee with a chequered past and enemies she never named. Suspicion settles at once on the young farmer who raised the alarm, for the evidence against him looks damning, and the local police want a quick arrest.

But one guest at a nearby country house refuses to accept the obvious. Genial, unhurried, and far shrewder than he appears, he begins to sift a muddle of footprints, copper spangles, and a discarded stylographic pen abandoned in the long grass. Each clue draws him deeper into a tangle of old grudges, secret callers, and a love affair someone would kill to conceal. Before the truth comes to light, more than one reputation-and one life-will hang in the balance.