After two prostitutes are found strangled and the wife of the St. Michael's Cathedral Dean and a respectable woman on her way to work go missing, Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler is put on the case and faces the greatest danger of his life.

From the outside, the cathedral town of Lafferton seems idyllic, but in many ways it is just like any other place. It suffers from the same kinds of crime, is subject to the same pressures from a rapidly changing world, and has the same hopes and fears as any number of towns up and down the land. When Simon Serrailler is called in by Lafferton's new Chief Constable, Kieran Bright, he is met by two plainclothes officers, who ask him to take the principal...