During Holy Week at Bampton, the priest’s clerk Odo is entrusted with watching the Easter Sepulchre, where the Host and crucifix are kept between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. When the watch is found abandoned in the middle of the night and Odo cannot be located, alarm spreads through the parish. Hugh de Singleton is roused to search for him, and a small physical clue soon suggests that the clerk’s disappearance is not a simple act of neglect or flight.
The mystery is built around medieval parish worship. The Easter Sepulchre was part of the dramatic liturgical observance of Christ’s burial and resurrection, so abandoning such a responsibility would be both socially conspicuous and spiritually serious. Hugh’s investigation moves through clergy, parishioners and domestic routines in a community where church time orders the calendar. Rather than treating ritual as atmosphere, the novel makes religious practice central to the circumstances of the crime and to what witnesses believe Odo would—or would not—have done.
