Megan Rhys is due at a police conference on sex offenders -- not a particularly nice subject, but it does mean she can get away from her office at Birmingham's Heartland University and spend a few days by the sea at her grandmother's cottage in Borth. It turns out not to be quite the kind of break she was anticipating when a body turns up, miraculously preserved, in the bog behind the golf course. It seems that her place of refuge is no longer a safe haven from the violence that is her stock in trade. Only time and the pathologist will tell if the mutilated bog man is an ancient or a modern relic of man's inhumanity to man, but not before Megan's skills in forensic psychology and her unerring gut instinct for trouble are tested to the limits by a ruthless killer determined on revenge for past misdeeds.