The Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry is a lonely, forgotten spot. Requisitioned decades earlier by the Ministry of Defence for military training, one of its few claims to fame is that in its entire thousand-year history, it never recorded a single crime. But when a Territorial Army exercise is held amongst the ruins, a skeleton is found hanging in a bricked-up cellar, a noose round the neck.

It seems that the ghostly village may hide many secrets and local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is soon on the case. Then a man, pulled unconscious from the river at nearby Ely, claims to have lost his memory, yet reacts with startled fear to the name Jude's Ferry ...