When an elderly priest is murdered, the killer searches the victim so desperately that Father Gorman’s already ragged cassock is torn in the process.

But just what was the killer looking for? And what had a dying woman confided to the priest on her death-bed, only hours earlier?

Maybe the three women, rumoured to practise the ’Dark Arts’, who run The Pale Horse public house can provide the answers. Or maybe the solution lies in the darker side of human nature...

There are two methods, it seems to me, of approaching this strange business of the Pale Horse. In spite of the dictum of the White King, it is difficult to achieve simplicity. One cannot, that is to say, ’Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.’ For where is the beginning?