After more than twenty years in exile, Mallon de Wolfe-formidable, handsome, and with a shard of ice where his heart should be-returns to his ancestral home to confront his past. The windswept heathlands of Dartmoor are vast, barren, and perilous. A place of superstition, where no man walks without the moon to guide him. Newly-widowed Countess Rosseline arrives at Wulverton Hall with secrets to protect. Haunted by scandal, she'll stop at nothing...

Master of the moor: As a boy, Stephen Whalby took to his beloved moor to escape trouble at home. Trouble follows him there as an adult, however, when women's bodies begin turning up among the rocks, heather, and bogs. Stephen finds no refuge when D.I. Manciple--a rude outsider, unwelcome in the village of Vangmoor--targets him as the prime suspect. Vanity dies hard: In the town of Salstead, the lives of two friends seem to take different trajectories....