The Lodge of the Golden Windhorse has provided the citizens of Compton Dando with splendid fodder for gossip, prompting speculation of arcane rituals and bizarre sexual practices. But with the murder of the commune's leaders, the rumor-mill goes into overdrive. In trying to solve those murders, Chief Inspector Barnaby is less excited than exasperated. The residents of the Windhorse commune may have been seeking the simple life, but they're all concealing complicated pasts?or past lives. As in Death of a Hollow Man, Graham is at her most gleeful when skewering the eccentricities of a closed community, and no one survives unscathed.