When Alec and Naomi travel to Somerset for a winter holiday, they encounter local eccentric Eddy Thame, a historian and metal detectorist, and when Eddy is found dead a few days later, Alec and Naomi reluctantly become involved in the investigation into his death.

Summoned to an inquiry in Belfast, asking him to give testimony about his participation in a disastrous event during the Troubles, ailing ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic Stephen Rose, just beginning to build a fragile bond with the adult daughter he barely knows, must finally face the consequences of his actions.

Leonie Harcourt, nearly eighteen, has turned her back on England - she's in love with Parisian life, and with the young painter met there at her god mother's house. But it's the summer of 1939; she's sent home, reluctantly, to a London preparing for war. After a brief, ecstatic reunion with Luc, come to join de Daulle's Free French, she is dispatched to an unknown aunt's farm in Somerset. Luc doesn't return after the war, but throughout her eventual...