A guest's death is predicted in a locked box on Monday. By Wednesday, it has come true. One unlikely mentalist is going to have to work out how somebody fakes the future.

When Barry Holt, short, balding, and convincing rich strangers he can read their futures in a plastic crystal ball, arrives at Cairnmore House, a five-star golf resort in the Perthshire hills, the closest thing to drama he expects is a poor turnout for his Monday cabaret. Then Rory Atherton, the club's richest and least missed member, turns up dead on the 14th hole, in almost exactly the way the resort's Predictions Box said he would.

The local police cannot get past one impossible question. How could anyone have known a man's death before it happened? Barry, who spends his evenings faking exactly that kind of foreknowledge, sees a trick. His wife Helena, hired to judge whether Cairnmore should sell its future to Atherton's money, keeps finding people relieved the deal died with him.