Rona Parish's latest assignment, a series of articles on the town of Buckford, is almost complete when a young woman named Zara Crane approaches her with a request to help her trace her natural parents. Rona's curiosity is aroused - not least because, she discovers that Zara's birth mother had been murdered in her bath twenty-five years earlier. Though Rona's husband, Max, and her friends do their best to dissuade her from getting involved in what they fear may turn out to be another dangerous case, Rona cannot resist the challenge. As she starts to trace people who may have known Zara's parents, she finds herself having to deal at the same time with complications in her own life.