A new adventure for Elizabethan sleuth Tom Musgrave.

Tom runs to help a young messenger who has been stabbed through the heart – and through the message wallet that he wore immediately above it. He decyphers the remaining letters of the message as an urgent cry for help from Lady Margaret Outram, struck dumb by terror in childhood, whom Tom has already saved from rape and death and restored to her rightful place as one of the richest women in the country.

Now, down in her huge, gloomy Castle of Cotehel, high above the haunted Cornish cliffs, her household is unstoppably caught up in ancient tradition, preparing to celebrate New Year in the old style on April 1st with the sinister, unbridled license of the Feast of All Fools. A Feast where, she suspects all too shrewdly, anything might happen. Especially to a woman who cannot even scream for help.