Wycliffe and the Scapegoat (1978) is a crime novel by Cornish writer W. J. Burley.[1]
Every Halloween in Cornwall, the life size effigy of a man rolls down the cliffs and into the sea inside a flaming wheel; the morbid commemoration of an age old Pagan ritual whereby the dummy would in fact be a human sacrifice. This year, however, every gruesome detail of the legend is re-enacted when respected builder and undertaker Jonathan Riddle finds himself signed up as the so-called 'scapegoat', strapped within the blazing ferris wheel and pushed towards a fiery grave.
Wycliffe's investigation, meanwhile, proves almost as bizarre as the crime itself, with baffling new evidence arriving by the bucket load, and the eventual discovery of a solution stranger than anything he's ever encountered before...