When Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray is sent on a training course to his alma mater, St Frideswide's College, Oxford, the memories come flooding back. He finds himself sleeping in the same kind of cold garret room he slept in as a student, bumping into his old tutors in the quadrangles, eating in the grand hall... Oxford is just as he remembers it. But life amongst the dreaming spires is not as tranquil as it may seem. A senior tutor has recently gone missing - taking his mistress and #1m of the college's money with him. Thackeray reluctantly joins the investigation into his whereabouts and, as he discovers more about the cloistered world of Oxford colleges, it rapidly becomes clear that there are untold horrors just waiting to be uncovered...