Lovable Scottish constable Hamish Macbeth -- who would rather be fishing than detecting -- must root out another criminal in his thirteenth charmingly clever case.As the small village of Lochdubh has no dentist, locals travel 20 miles to Frederick Gilchrist's dental surgery in the town of Braikie. Although Lochdubh's one-man police force, Hamish Macbeth, prefers the more modern, painless procedures practiced by dentists in the city of Inverness, a blinding toothache one morning convinces him to give Gilchrist a try. Upon arriving, Hamish finds the dentist dead on the floor, a victim of nicotine poisoning. Discovering that the deceased was a non-smoker, Hamish must put his own toothache on ice -- to extract a murderer on the loose.