While seeking the legendary Holy Trough of Blackamoor, D I Montague Pluke comes across a corpse; the dead man, Pluke discovers, has been shot. It is soon established that the victim was a suspect in a murder investigation, and so the eccentric Pluke is pitched headlong into an investigation, which spans both sides of the Pennines, leading him from the beauty of the great outdoors to the seamy backstreets of Manchester.