Handsome, naked and murdered in a barn on the edge of the fens. A fate that poses many questions.

But who wants them asked, let alone answered?

Certainly not the local lord anxious to keep his dubious land dealings out of the public eye. Luckily, he has a tame constable and a needy cousin who can be persuaded to dispose of the body decently but without reporting it. Unfortunately, that’s a hanging offence were it to be discovered.

There it might have ended if the body hadn’t been that of a man who’d caught the king’s eye and the cousin hadn’t been Oliver Cromwell, in his “ungodly” days before Puritanism enraptured him. His problem – which he takes time to realise – is not that the debauched courtiers of King James also want the murder concealed but that they have ordered a marshal to eliminate anyone who found out about it.

Threatened with the marshal’s dagger as well as the hangman’s rope, Cromwell must balance the need to unravel what he is involved in with the urgency of not being connected to it.