Access to Lochdubh is along a single, twisting, one-track road, but even its isolation can't keep Crystal French of Strathbane Television from dragging her crew and cameras into town. There to do a new show focusing on village life, Crystal quickly earns the outrage of the local folks when she rakes up old scandals and intimate secrets - tactics that promptly get her high ratings. Soon, even the local astrology column is hinting that Crystal had better watch her step. And no one, least of all Constable Hamish Macbeth, is surprised when she is killed.
Glum with the news that his former fiancee, the incomparable Priscilla, has found a new love interest, Macbeth fails to notice that the writer of the astrology column, a pretty lady named Elspeth Grant, has taken a fancy to him. He spends his time with his dog Lugs, all the while bucking the police brass with his own theories about who murdered Crystal.
Warned off the case by his Strathbane superiors, Macbeth is left to question a troupe of gypsies about quarters stolen from the Lochdubh Laundromat. But when violence again disrupts the placid Highland air, Macbeth finds his theories evaporating. With a new threat appearing on the horizon - one that would forever tear him away from his beloved Lochdubh - everything is unclear in Macbeth's world, except for his own haunting suspicion that the killer is someone he knows all to well ...