When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from 'Hamlet'.The career of the Yorkshire Choker in under way. If Detective-Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he's downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant. Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums - it's all a load of bloody nonsense as far as he's concerned, designed to make fools of him and his department. And meanwhile the Choker strikes again and again ...