As volunteers clean up after a huge outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire in 1969, they discover the body of a young woman wrapped in a sleeping bag. She has been brutally murdered. The detective assigned to the case, Stanley Chadwick, is a hard-headed, strait-laced veteran of the Second World War. He could not have less in common with -- or less regard for -- young, disrespectful, long-haired hippies, smoking marijuana and listening to the pulsing sounds of rock and roll. But he has a murder to solve, and it looks as if the victim was somehow associated with the up-and-coming psychedelic pastoral band the Mad Hatters. In the present, Inspector Alan Banks is investigating the murder of a freelance music journalist who was working on a feature about the Mad Hatters for MOJO magazine. This is not the first time that the Mad Hatters, now aging rock superstars, have been brushed by tragedy.

At first, she appeared to be a remnant of the Festival: a beautiful girl with a painted cornflower blooming on her cheek, sleeping off the excess of the night before. It's the summer of 1969, but it seems not all the revellers had peace and love on their minds.

Four decades on, Chief Inspector Banks is called from his dinner to a far bloodier scene. A stranger has been murdered in a remote village, and before Banks can begin to uncover the motive he must first identify the body. Nothing is straightforward in this case, and soon he is on a path of discovery that leads back into the past: to a murder in the summer of 1969 that everyone had thought long-since solved...