Phoebe Britton dies in a climbing "accident" in the Swiss Alps, which does nothing to slow her husband Aiden's seemingly inevitable march towards 10 Downing Street. After the funeral, Phoebe's cosmopolitan sister Rosamund realises just how far her brother-in-law will go to secure what he considers to be his political destiny and that includes an elaborate and lethal cover-up of events as a Cambridge student twenty years before. Fearing that she may soon be attending her own funeral, Rosamund goes on the run, but powerful Aiden soon has his own private army of bully-boys on her trail.