In the second Professor Peter Shandy mystery, Shandy is in trouble up to the eyeballs again. With the Annual Competition of the Balaclava County Draft Horse Association coming up, some saboteur has reversed all the horseshoes nailed to the stable doors of Balaclava Agricultural Col lege as good-luck charms. Shandy predicts dire happenings. His predictions are nowhere near dire enough.

Old friend and colleague Timothy Ames totters on the brink of another disastrous marriage. As Shandy's wife Helen (née Marsh) plans a quiet little dinner party, she is taken hostage at gunpoint while Peter is forced to help steal a vanload of gold and silver that ought to be easily tracked down but isn't. After the party, one of their guests is found murdered in a pigpen from which Belinda of Balaclava, the college's prize sow, has been abducted. President Thorkjeld Svenson's fire-brand daughter, Birgit, may hold the key to the mystery, but Birgit won't talk. With only twenty-six sunflower seeds and a jar of pickled pigs' feet for clues, Shandy must solve another murder, restore serenity to the Svenson household before Thorkjeld goes berserk and loses the Senior Plowmen's trophy to the Headless Horsemen of Hoddersville, get a distinguished professor out of jail, and find out where in Sam Hill somebody is hiding a pregnant 900-pound sow. Then, of course, there's the really big problem: Can even Peter Shandy persuade vastly adorable Iduna Bjorklund to lure Tim away from horrid Lorene McSpee?