A skydiving routine for charity goes horribly awry, leaving a wealthy lord dead and his household at odds over whether it was a tragic accident . . . or cold-blooded murder at twenty thousand feet. To fundraise for the parish in bucolic Thornford Regis, Father Tom Christmas skydives, plummeting for charity. While his landing is bumpy, it's nothing compared to that of Hector, Earl of Fairhaven, who leaps from twenty thousand feet with disastrous results. Some residents of the town, including every member of the Earl's household, however, believe that those results were not accidental, and soon Tom Christmas is investigating a crime that will take him into the secrets of his own past, and in for a very hard landing of his own.