Four corpses, all members of the same family, are discovered by a retired academic visiting his old childhood haunts. The police investigation focuses upon the one surviving family member but as the police pursue their enquiries they learn that the family fell from grace years ago and has links to a remote Yorkshire village. "Hennessey and Yellich find that blue blood marks the spot There was a time when Simon Knapp wouldn't have dared go near Edgefield House - as a teenager, he'd only had the nerve to snoop around the grounds. But now, returning fifty years on, he marches straight up to the derelict eighteenth-century stately home and pushes open its front door. Curiosity killed the cat and Knapp then faces something that makes his mature nonchalance seem decidedly ill-placed."