Snow has fallen for days across Dartmoor, and the remote village of Sittaford is nearly cut off from the world. To pass a dull winter evening, the guests gathered at Sittaford House begin a game of table-turning, and the moving table spells out a chilling message: Captain Trevelyan, the absent owner of the house, is dead, murdered. The group dismisses it as a parlour trick until the captain's old friend Major Burnaby insists on trudging six miles through the drifts to check. When he reaches Trevelyan's house in Exhampton, he finds the captain dead from a blow to the head, killed at roughly the hour the spirits named. The police, led by the methodical Inspector Narracott, quickly fix on a suspect with a clear motive, and an arrest follows. But Emily Trefusis, fiancee of the accused, refuses to accept the official version. Convinced of his innocence, she enlists a sharp newspaper reporter and sets out to question every neighbour, weigh every alibi, and unpick the puzzle of how a man could be murdered miles from a séance that predicted it. Among the suspects are the two newcomers renting Sittaford House for the winter, a circle of eccentric villagers, and family members with reasons to want the captain gone. Set against a frozen moorland landscape, the story turns a chatty rural community into a closed field of suspects, and follows a determined amateur detective as she races the law to find the truth before an innocent man pays for another's crime.