Literature professor Kate Fansler is asked once again to turn her talents to private investigation when Winifred Ashby - honorary niece of Oxford scholar and novelist Charlotte Stanton - inexplicably disappears from her quiet farmhand life.
Using Winifred's journal and Charlotte's novels as her only available sources, Kate must follow a scantily informed trail through Oxford to Santa Cruz before finally untangling the secrets of Winifred's past.
But Kate's investigation reveals far more than she anticipated as issues of illigetimicary and inheritance arise...