When Mary Jane Ben­nett is found dead in her bed — alone, stran­gled by her own scarf, and with every door in the house locked — the med­ical exam­in­er rules her death acci­den­tal, the result of a sex game gone hor­ri­bly awry. State police decline to inves­ti­gate fur­ther, but Queens­bridge Police Chief Caleb Crane doesn’t buy for a minute that his good friend died this way, so he under­takes his own inves­ti­ga­tion. Fac­ing town coun­cilors afraid of bad pub­lic­i­ty, an angry med­ical exam­in­er, and his own per­son­al demons, he labors to solve what he believes is the first-ever mur­der in his pas­toral Berk­shire Hills vil­lage. Com­pli­cat­ing things: the list of sus­pects includes some of the peo­ple to whom he is clos­est — includ­ing his own wife. 

Run­ning through­out the book is the sto­ry of Purim and its mes­sages. Who is the killer hid­ing behind a mask?