When world famous singer Maggie Tressider crashes her car on the way to a concert, she wakes up in hospital, dazed, in a post-operative shock—and haunted. From some secret place in her subconscious arises the awful conviction that somehow, at some time in the past, she has been responsible for a death. A psychiatrist, her doctor suggests, might lay the nameless spectre to rest. 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 him 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 not only back into the past, but which takes Killian, Bunty and George to a remote corner of the Austrian alps, where many frontiers touch and many trails cross. And where even today some of them end—with murder...