Daisy Dalrymple visits relatives with fiancé DCI Alec Fletcher, and covers the 1923 Henley Royal Regatta for an American magazine. But tensions escalate between the Ambrose team coxswain Horace Bott - shopkeeper's son and scholarship student at Oxford - and rower Basil DeLancey - the son of an Earl and all-round bounder - who keels over and dies mid-race.