Ethel Weir's killer was never found, though the young man who stumbled over her body was at one point due to hang. Testifying on his behalf was Parley Burns, schoolteacher and 'gentleman sadist', whose attentions unsettle and alarm the girls in his charge. When reporter Connie Flood arrives to cover the story, she receives a nasty shock: in her late teens she taught alongside Parley in another town where a female pupil also met a tragic and mysterious end. Years later, Connie's niece Anne, impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt, rolls back the decades to unravel these lingering enigmas. In piecing together what happened, she stumbles into an unexpected passion of her own that draws her closer to the tragedies and deepens her sympathy for behaviour that cannot be explained.