Newly married Detective Sergeant Kate Lewis returns from a disastrous honeymoon straight into a macabre case: a teenage girl, last seen leaving a party at the height of a local scarecrow festival, is found strangled and partially stripped in her own barn. Kate soon begins to find startling parallels between her current case and the 150-year-old murder of a peasant girl, Martha Tinney, alleged by superstitious locals to have been committed by a spectral scarecrow, known as Strawfoot. The police are going to have to work fast to catch the copycat killer before the peace of the Somerset Levels is further shattered.