Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown.

'He realised that he would drown here. Someone had crafted this seat to drown people. To drown him. Terror rushed from his brain to rouse every cell in his body, but there was nothing to be done. He was well and truly tethered. Slowly it dawned on him that he did know why he was sitting here. He'd spent all his life running from this nightmare, and now he'd landed in its clutches.' Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown. As the journalist Hannis Martinsson investigates, he comes across evidence of more deaths which have been caused in the same way, and starts to realise that they are all linked to a local revolt several decades earlier, which tore a community apart. The repercussions have continued to the present day, and Hannis' enquiries soon put his own life in danger.