Flashing between past and present, Anshaw's seductive and vivid prose lures you deep into layers of mystery of both the emotional and the criminal sort. Chris, our narrator, struggles day by day to find herself as an independent person while she copes with the sudden unexplained disappearance of her lover. Her bereaved search for some kind of meaning in it all causes her to accidentally unearth a person whose existence she never imagined, a dark stranger looking out from the eyes of the missing woman whom she'd thought she'd known.