It is barely three months since the murder of his wife. Walking the cliffs of Cornwall in an attempt to recover from his loss, the last thing Thomas Lynley expects to find is a body. The young man seems to have died in a climbing accident. But soon, against his every intention, Lynley finds himself drawn into a murder inquiry. It is barely three months since the murder of his wife and Thomas Lynley takes to the South-West Coast Path in Cornwall, determined to walk its length in an attempt to distract himself from his loss. On the forty-third day of this walk, he sees a cliff climber fall to his death, apparently witnessed by a surfer in a nearby cove. Shortly afterwards, Lynley encounters a young woman from Bristol whose personal history is a blank before her thirteenth year. These events propel him into a case that brings Barbara Havers from London and thrusts both detectives into a world where revenge is only one of the motives they must sift through to identify a killer.