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 the disappearance of a young woman, 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. To this day, she has no idea what led her to the scene and she dreads being back in the city. As Sam looks into the woman's disappearance, she finds the trail leads back to the university. But the closed academic world is unwilling to share its secrets with a stranger. Soon it becomes clear that someone is determined to frighten her off the case, and then, out of the blue, Sam receives a letter from a man who's been dead for twenty-eight years - her father...