A murder seems a hundred times more shocking when you know the victim. It seems to make the danger personal . . .

Apprentice healer Lassair isn’t too alarmed when a travelling peddler relates a grizzly tale of a red-bearded giant breaking into a woman’s home and caving in her skull like an eggshell; peddlers, she has observed, tend towards the dramatic. But her attitude changes when she learns that the dead woman is a distant relation. Obstreperous, elderly Utta will not be much missed, but the incident makes Lassair’s family uneasy. For the intruder seemed to be searching for something. Something he did not find.

What could it be? Lassair has no idea. Utta was not rich, and she had no precious heirlooms. But as the stranger grows increasingly desperate, and his search brings violence to her very home, Lassair must confront a terrifying thought: the killer will do anything to discover his prize, and he seems to think she knows where it is . . .