Palo Alto, northern California, 1975

A child goes missing in northern California. Twenty years later, people want to know why, and the past begins to unravel for a group of former friends who thought they’d escaped it forever.

Seattle 1995

A group of students retire to a remote house to experiment with LSD. One, Michael Quinn, kidnaps a child. A body is found. And for the rest of the group the battle to escape justice begins.

Twenty years on, with Quinn about to be unexpectedly released from jail, a mysterious young Englishwoman, Joni Lascelles, arrives in the city, asking questions about the kidnapping, unravelling the past for those who thought it was long dead. The horror of the past comes to engulf the present, leaving no-one untouched by its power. Turn by turn, shifting effortlessly between two eras twenty years apart, the story is played out with relentless compulsion to an overwhelming climax.