A ravaged, cratered wood, a man in uniform long dead - this is not a World War One battlefield, but Wanwood House, a pharmaceutical research centre.

Away to the south, Peter Pascoe is attending his grandmother’s funeral, and scattering her ashes leads him too into war-ravaged woods in search of his great-grandfather who fought and died in the Passchendaele campaign.

Seeing the wood for the trees is a problem for Andy Dalziel and Edgar Wield, the latter in his investigation into the bones found at Wanwood, and the former in his involvement with an animal rights activist, despite her possible complicity in a murderous assault and her appalling taste in whisky.