Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks Richard Jury to prove brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale's granddaughter is an impostor. Excavation of Tynedale's bombed London pub, the Blue Last, has turned up two skeletons – was the child found his real granddaughter? Meanwhile Melrose Plant reluctantly poses as an under gardener to investigate the nanny who purportedly saved the baby's life.

Saturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Saturday night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise hell with, Saturday night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn't want to be seen alone on a Saturday night.... Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

The setting: a small, sleepy American town where secrets are almost impossible to keep. The center of town life: the Rainbow Cafe where Maud Chadwick works as a waitress, hiding behind a quiet manner the intensity and confusion of emotions she feels as her twenty-year-old son takes his final steps out of her life and into his own. Maud?s only confidant: Sam DeGheyn, the town sheriff, who, trapped in a loveless, childless marriage, turns his attentions to Maud, and to the murders of three local women, which have occurred in the past five years. Sam?s suspicion: that the wrong man may have been convicted of the crimes and the right man may soon kill again.

The girl?s hair was white below the scarf, now a scarf of snow, and there was a fine rime of ice on her eyebrows. Her mouth was so numb she couldn?t have spoken even if there had been someone to speak to. She wore the snowshoes she had found back in the cabin and had brought the supplies, painkiller and bandages, whatever she might need to dress a wound. She wondered if trappers wore snowshoes. Probably not. Anyway, a trapper wouldn?t put himself through the unpleasantness of coming out in a heavy snow like this to check his traps. In New Mexico, the law was you had to check the traps every thirty-six hours, but who paid any attention? An animal trapped stayed trapped.

The sun, smoking behind a haze of cloud, threw off a light of burnished pewter. Mysteriously lit, it was as if the watery, colorless land refused drabness, stood determinedly against dimishment. This is a landscape that can easily deceive, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as if to say, You're on your own, mate—much like the habitues of the only pub for miles around called The Case Has Altered.The Lincolnshire fenlands are the right setting for Richard Jury's latest case, a mystifying double murder. The body of one woman is found on the wash; another woman lies floating in a canal in Windy Fen. Both women are connected with Fengate: Dorcas Reese, a servant; Verna Dunn, the louche ex-wife of the owner, Max Owen, a man with a passion for antiques. So when the principal suspect turns out to be Jenny Kennington, a woman Jury has long loved, he decides he needs someone inside Fengate, someone who can impersonate an antiques expert...