The sweltering summer of 1911, a time of unbreathable heat, with locomotive sparks setting fire to cornfields, half the country out on strike, German gunboats manoeuvring suspiciously off North Africa One Friday at York station, Detective Sergeant Jim Stringer encounters a young aristocrat who is being transferred to Durham Gaol in order to be hung for murder on the Monday. His apparent crime stems from entanglements in the village of Adenwold, thirty miles north of York. Having concluded that the man is innocent of his crime, Jim heads for Adenwold with his wife, Lydia (who had been hoping for a weekend in Scarborough). They encounter half-abandoned place, oppressed by surrounding wooodland, and tenuously connected to the outside world by a sleepy branch line. Jim has forty-eight hours to penetrate the swirling conspiracies of Adenwold. This novel was shorlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award 2008.