January, white-frost, a pitch-black night. Despite the cold, Detective Inspector Zig Batten is enjoying his first West Country 'Wassail' - an ancient apple-orchard ceremony. His partner's young daughter is this year's Wassail Queen. A torchlight procession ends in the ritual firing of shotguns to scare 'evil spirits' from the trees and revive the apple-blossom. But not every shotgun fires blanks, and next day it's a dead body that has blossomed in the orchard. What is the killer's motive? Why this victim? And who is sending anonymous letters to the villagers of Stockton Marsh, where Batten's own Sergeant lives? Winter closes in, but murder does not stop with the dead - it tunnels into the living too, as Batten and Ball discover. Will their endangered lives and relationships ever be quite the same? As snow descends, the police make ready. Until another corpse is found...