As Jemima Shore, Investigator, arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday, the sun is shining. Paradise, she thinks. But at that moment, she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral."

So begins an adventure far removed from Jemima's visions of heather-covered hills, crystal-clear streams, romantic men in kilts, fairy-tale castles. Instead she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions, jealousies and violence. The setting is the Wild Island itself, sometimes enchanting but too often frighteningly remote, the streams, not silvery, but brown and sinister; her holiday home with its disturbing influence; the people -- none of them quite what they seem.