When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences of encroaching farmers, a crow drops a severed human finger at their feet. And where there's a finger, thinks Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, a body can't be far behind.

It would seem that there are a handful of bodies to whom the finger might belong. A suspiciously long list of people have gone missing from Great Rooden's farming country: the tippling son of a local pillar of society, a financier who may have angered the wrong man, and even an old tramp or two who may have thieved one apple too many. Can the old tag team of DI Sloan and Constable Crosby solve the case?