For forty years, Frances Weaver has suppressed the frightening memory of the horror she endured in a desolate rural mansion owned by two eccentric and sinister elderly sisters in a remote part of Ireland. Frances had gone there to research her first historical biography and instead fell into a murderous intrigue involving the mysterious pre-Raphaelite beauty, Jenny, and a bitter family conspiracy from the past. Long since back in England, Frances, now a successful academic biographer, finds the notes she made in the 1960s and relives the terrifying experience that ended in murder and the discovery that she was not the only stranger in the house.