Alan McGee, the local butcher is found with a large meat cleaver buried in his head. It's not suicide, that's for sure. Detective Inspector Sarah Flemons is called out to investigate and soon teams up with DS Josie Armstrong and Constable Don Bailey to find the killer. The dead butcher was an active member of a local vigilante group, the Civic Mission, who are stirring bad feelings in the town by their over-zealous activities. Naturally, it is the first line of enquiry that the police team follow up on.

They soon discover that Mr McGee had been looking into a string of thefts in the area. Other members of the Civic Mission are quick to point fingers at Paddy Quirk – a one-eyed petty thief with a long history of 'borrowing' other people's belongings. But no sooner have the police enquiries begun, when another body is discovered. Now, Inspector Flemons' suspicions fall on members of the Civic Mission themselves, none of whom has an alibi and many of whom may have had a reason to kill.

Add into the mix an unsolved hit-and-run, a dominatrix and her transvestite husband, and a local ne'er-do-well whose lifetime achievement was to steal some garden gnomes, and you have the setting for a problematical case that takes Sarah Flemons right to the limit – quite literally.