Everyone in Knight's Crossing shuns the abandoned Stryker farmstead, even the village's most powerful magicians. Thirty years earlier, young Dale Stryker butchered his family, including his much-feared grandfather, Wizard Ezekiel; then he vanished, but not quite forever. When a lost boy propels the cold case back into the news, DCI Arthur Ravyn and DS Leo Stark of the Hammershire Constabulary find themselves pitted against not only a murderer who has long hid in shadow, but villagers wary of strangers and for whom magic, both dark and light, is a part of everyday life, and death.