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It's a rainy night in the Yorkshire village of Strenton and a mysterious stranger arrives. Daggers are drawn in the village with the arrival of a new bypass. In advance of the road being built, an archaeological team is digging to find the remains of an ancient burial site but instead find a mutilated body.
Murder, intrigue and local politics leave Dalziel and Pascoe confused as to who is responsible for the mounting death toll in a seemingly sleepy and quiet village, in the first of a two-part story which concludes tomorrow.
There is a conflict of the old and the new as a proposed site for a new road bypass is allowed to be excavated by a team of archaeologists from the local university. It’s a race against time for Dr Rix’s archaeological team to find what she believes should be the ancient site of Queen Cartimandua’s burial, before the road builders arrive and cover the whole area with tarmac for good.
But when the site becomes a crime scene it is closed to both the dig and the builders, causing friction between the two groups. After a fight, the site is destroyed and with it any police evidence. However, when one of the builders is discovered dead in his caravan the finger of suspicion points to a local criminal that Dalziel helped to convict years previously for a particularly vicious murder, old wounds are opened and cause a past case to haunt Dalziel. Will his rigorous detective work win through or will his strong instincts fail him?