Sam Falconer is pretty good at taking care of herself. Four times world judo champion, she now runs the Gentle Way investigation agency in London. But when her brother Mark asks her to return to Oxford to investigate a disappearance of a woman that's shaken the city's university, Sam finds herself confronting a past she hoped she'd left behind. Oxford is full of ghosts and Sam has never quite recovered from finding the body of a murdered 4-year-old girl there. She has no idea what led her to the spot and would do anything rather than return to the scene. As Sam begins to investigate the woman's disappearance, she becomes increasingly uneasy. Someone is determined to frighten her off the case and then she receives a letter from a man who's been dead for twenty years - her father...