After twenty-five years abroad in America, Chris Lowndes decides to return to the Yorkshire dales of his youth. The rambling old mansion he buys is charming, but something about it disturbs him—a feeling made ever stronger when he learns that the house was the scene of a murder more than fifty years before. The former owner, a prominent doctor named Ernest Arthur Fox, was supposedly poisoned by his beautiful and much younger wife, Grace. Arrested and brought to trial, Grace was found guilty and hanged for the crime.

The more Chris discovers about the case, the more convinced he becomes that Grace may have been innocent. Ignoring warnings to leave things alone, he sets out on a quest that takes him deep into the past and into a web of secrets that lie all too close to the present.