The Reverend Henry Archery has a problem. His son wants to marry the lovely, clever daughter of a man hanged sixteen years ago for a brutal axe-killing. So, he decides he must try to clear the dead criminal's name. The girl's mother has always maintained, in the teeth of police evidence, that her daughter's father was no murderer. And there are certain areas of doubt - more than one person stood to gain by the victim's death, for instance. So Archery starts digging. Soon enough, he unearths some disturbing fragments of previously buried information...