"We are surrounded by death, and there is no way to stop it. No way at all." Caroline Rhodes is skeptical of the dire warning. But a Gypsy fortuneteller's words prove true when the discovery of a Viking rune stone on the campus of Bruck University leads to murder during the school's annual Festival of Knights. Blackmailed into investigating the crime by the despised university president, Caroline is dismayed to find her suspects are as plentiful as the flowers on Bruck Green. Questions come easily to the veteran ER nurse, but the answers are not so obvious. Did Andrew Littlewort's famous temper get the best of him, or is the eccentric professor as innocent as he claims? Is Sid Burke the proverbial "bad seed", or just a troubled student from a famous family? How did Emma Reiser amass a fortune on a government salary? And why does Bruck's gardener call his flowerbeds 'paths of gold'? Most troubling of all, what is Agatha Hagendorf really gazing at through her telescope at the Rhineburg Boarding House and Home for Gentle Women? Caroline teams up with septuagenarian Professor Carl Atwater to track a killer without a conscience in little Rhineburg, Illinois.