Runagates in Scarceness tells of a murder that took place in a fictitious Episcopal seminary in Indiana during the Vietnam War. The victim is a student there who represented the flower-child movement of the time, and the chief suspect is a fellow student who won the Medal of Honor in the war before coming to the seminary. The wife of the suspect, who had been in the Miss America Pageant, had accepted the victim as a spiritual director, and he had intended to encourage her to take LSD as a means of inducing mystical experiences. The professor of church history solves the crime by his use of what he considers correct principles of historiography.
