Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown. As the journalist Hannis Martinsson investigates, he comes across evidence of more deaths which have been caused in the same way, and starts to realise that they are all linked to a local revolt several decades earlier, which tore a community apart. The repercussions have continued to the present day, and Hannis' enquiries soon put his own life in danger.