Five years after Morse's death, Lewis - now promoted to inspector - returns to his old stomping ground of the university city of Oxford after an attachment on the British Virgin Islands. Even before Lewis can get home from the airport, he and his new, much younger colleague Hathaway are diverted by the flashing blue lights and police activity of a murder scene, centered on the death by a single bullet of an American college student. Another student, Danny Griffon, is suspected of being involved - and he had a brush with the law some years previously, investigated by a certain Inspector Morse.