As inspector John Underwood and his team frantically try to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an extraordinary turn. Harrington's murderer contacts English Literature lecturer Heather Stussman and challenges her to explain his actions to the police. But not until another woman is murdered does Stussman realise that the key to the killer's terrifying motive lies buried in the works of a port who has been dead for nearly four hundred years...