The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip Pimbo, shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide? Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must...

"It's 1743, and the tanners of Preston are a pariah community, plying their unwholesome trade beside a stretch of riverside marsh where many Prestonians by ancient right graze their livestock. When the body of a newborn child is found in one of their tanning pits, Cragg's inquiry falls foul of a cabal of merchants dead set on modernizing the town's economy and regarding the despised tanners--and Cragg's apparent championship of them--as obstacles...

"November, 1745. Preston, Lancashire. Rumours abound that Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, has landed in Scotland, intent on marching south to claim the English throne. Meanwhile, a headless body is discovered in an icy pond. Coroner Titus Cragg thinks he has a lead when a head is eventually found - only to discover that it belongs to a different body. Could there be a connection to the approaching rebel army? Or is someone using the Highlanders'...