When world-famous singer Maggie Tressider crashes her car on the way to a concert, she wakes up in hospital, dazed, in post-operative shock- and haunted. From some secret place in her subconscious arises the awful conviction that somehow, at some point in the past, she has been responsible for a death. The only way to lay the nameless spectre is to confront it face to face. A psychiatrist, her doctor suggests. But Maggie chooses a very different expert to find the truth for her. Her commission launches private investigator Francis Killian on a hunt across Europe in search of a grave. But the trail also leads to one Bunty Felse, former colleague of Maggie’s and wife of Inspector Felse. The successful end of Killian’s search is only the beginning of a long pilgrimage for them all- a journey which leads her not only back to the past but to a remote corner of the Austrian alps, where many frontiers touch and many trails cross. And some of them end- with murder.