Peter Darwin was hoping for some quiet leave from the Foreign Office. Instead he found himself in the village of his childhood - at the service of a veterinary surgeon whose operating theatre was rapidly acquiring an unwanted reputation as an abattoir. The sudden unexplained death of a string of valuable racehorses from one small aerea in Gloucestershire was a mystery the police couldn't solve. But Darwin was local. He remembered the people and what as at stake... and now he knew enough to get himself killed...