For Iris Greenfeder—all but published, all but a professor, and all but married to her boyfriend of ten years—the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime—and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother's death, a strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. When Iris returns to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother's biography and search for her mother's missing manuscript, she unravels a haunting mystery that threatens to envelop her.