England, 1106 A.D., forty years after the Conquest.
When a Norman earl is killed while hunting, the dead man’s son invokes the dreaded murdrum law. This law presumes that the killer is English, and it requires the judicial district in which the crime took place to produce the guilty man or be hit with a massive fine.
The job of finding the killer falls to Miles Edwulfson, an English ploughman of noble descent. Miles served as a soldier with the earl in Wales, twenty years earlier, an experience that changed his life. Miles has two problems. First, he doesn’t believe the killer was English, but a member of the earl’s hunting party. Second, the arrow used in the crime belongs to Miles’s son, Aelred.
Facing opposition from the Norman nobility, his fellow Englishmen, and even his own family, Miles must save Aelred’s life and bring the real killer to justice.