Carolus Deene, the amateur detective with his own style of solving riddles of violent death, has to bide his time in the small Kentish village of Clibburn, where he is early given to understand he is a 'foreigner'. However, despite a trick to have him elsewhere, he is present when a popular local figure is shot dead on the stroke of midnight, and before his work is completed he has the answers to two other deaths, one of which was not even suspected. While he is not sure how seriously to take the local witchcraft stories, he perceives how a past event can have provided a blackmailer with a rare opportunity—and from that moment his own life is in danger.