Who's been dealt the devil's hand from this Tarot pack? Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his Thames Valley team have to find out. When the body of a young woman is discovered hanging upside down by the ankle from an oak known as the Wishing Tree on the Plummer estate, the quiet English village reverberates with whispers of tarot, occult practices and pagan rituals. But when the post-mortem reveals that the body has been dead for over a year by the time it was so gruesomely displayed, the mystery takes a bizarre turn. With DS Rosemary Zyczynski put painfully out of action on her way to the crime scene, the task is to piece together a plethora of seemingly unconnected links: the murky history of the Plummer family, cases of ritual slaughter, outbreaks of fire, the break-in of a Ministry of Defence Cold War bunker, and the suspiciously spot-on predictions of a convincing clairvoyant. Can Superintendent Yeadings and his team ascertain the identity of both victim and killer, and find out what really happened to the red-haired girl found dead on the Plummer estate?
