A black policeman from the Met might expect to meet some resistance, when he's transferred to a West Country seaside town—but, for DS Wesley Peterson, it's like coming home. One of the first people he bumps into is an old friend—Neil is heading an archaeological dig at a Tudor merchant's house, and Wesley has to tear himself away to become involved in a major search for a missing child. The tension is mounting when a body is found—but to Wesley's relief it is turned up at Neil’s dig and is more than 400 years old. It seems to be a tragic murder nonetheless, for the bones are those of a strangled young woman and a newborn baby. When another, more recent body is found, the circumstances surrounding the child's disappearance become more complex, and Wesley is increasingly convinced that the age-old motives of jealousy, sexual obsession, and desperate longing for a child are behind the crimes—ancient and modern—that he must solve soon if further tragedy is to be averted.