Crime novel set in the English countryside. Brilliant concert pianist Lowell Marshall retreats to a secluded cottage in the heart of Gloucestershire to compose a nocturne to prove to the world that he isn't to be pitied as a burnt-out has-been. At first the move is planned as temporary but soon the cottage exerts a strange hold on him. He finds a sepia photograph of a girl long dead whose delicate Victorian beauty haunts him until he can't think of anything else. His obsessive search to discover how she lived and how she died leads him to Rose, the living double of the the girl in the photograph. A turbulent relationship ensues only to have Rose's dark secrets threaten their love.