It was a macabre ending for an unjust judge: his throat slit by a sharp knife; his body stuffed into a lobster pot and left beneath a powerful jet of water shooting up through the cliffs from the turbulent Atlantic.

When Mara, Brehon of the nearby kingdom of the Burren, comes to investigate, she knows that her first suspects have to be the five young men who had received such savage sentences for minor crimes. But there are others in the frame: the nephew of the former Brehon, a man with the power of the Tudor court behind him. The child bride who hated her husband. The ill-treated apprentice.

And who was it who was seen on that moonlit night by the confused and elderly Fergus Mac Clancy?