Antony Maitland, barrister and very confidential detective, reluctantly journeys to a gray town in the English Midlands to defend a young boy who is, on the face of it, guilty of murder and art theft. Maitland’s problems are not reduced by the boy’s mysterious unwillingness to say anything on his own behalf beyond the baldest explanation; and as long as the boy refused to speak there was no possible line of defence. In order to save his client from what, Maitland finally realizes, will be a gross miscarriage of justice, he has to piece together the boy’s troubled past and, in the process, stumbles across a web of criminal intent in which the boy is just one victim—and Maitland the other.