It is the call Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid never expected — and one he certainly doesn't want. Victoria, his ex-wife, who walked out without an explanation more than a decade ago, asks him to look into the suicide of local poet, Lydia Brooke — a case that's been officially closed for five years. The troubled young writer's death, Victoria claims, might well have been murder.

No one is more surprised than Kincaid himself when he agrees to investigate — not even his partner and lover, Sergeant Gemma James. But it's a second death that raises the stakes and plunges Kincaid and James into a labyrinth of dark lies and lethal secrets that stretches all the way back through the twentieth century — a death that most assuredly is murder, one that has altered Duncan Kincaid's world forever.