- Local bootleggers come under suspicion after the murder of a revenue tax inspector.
- Whilst temperance campaigners, led by fervent ex-alcoholic parson Norman Grigor, protest against the Midsomer Abbas May Festival, the body of Peter Slim, a revenue inspector investigating illicit stills, is found dumped in a cider vat. The murder weapon, an apple tree harvester which shook him to death, belongs to boozy cider mill owner Anthony Devereux, a man with something to hide though he denies murder. Then Barnaby discovers a secret connecting Slim to a village girl and a party to that secret is murdered. As pub landlord Samuel Quested leads the villagers in the revival of an old fertility custom Barnaby and Jones find themselves in peril during the night of the stag.—don @ minifie-1
- Barnaby and Jones attend the Midsomer Abbas spring fair, a celebration of the village's friendship with Midsomer Herne. After sampling the local cider, Barnaby becomes unwell, and moments later a human corpse is discovered inside the cider vat: tax inspector Peter Slim, who investigated the traditional illicit alcohol, the devil according to temperance-obsessed self-declared revered Norman Grigor, a reformed lush directing his offspring and wives almost as a militia. The investigation reveals two insular village communities wedded to ancient traditions and suspicious of outsiders. When the bloodied fingerprints of the local cider mill owner Anthony Devereux are found on a wooden staff linked to the murder, the case seems solved. Local vicar Conrad Walker is appalled at pub landlord Samuel Quested's plans to revive an ancient fertility rite known as 'The Stag,' and soon afterwards is murdered in his own church. Upon discovering that he secretly married a local girl to Peter Slim, the detectives reckon that the motive for the killings is far darker than imagined, find the original horticultural murder MO and work out the moonshine network plus a land hunger master plot.—KGF Vissers
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