Retired professor Emily Cavanaugh and her husband, Luke, are taking a much-needed break from Windy Corner and spending their honeymoon five thousand miles away as paying guests at Fizhugh Manor in Oxfordshire.

Quaint nearby villages and the manor's impressive turrets and arches capture Emily's Anglophile heart, but when she meets its dashing young heir, James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison, James's cousin Penelope, his dithering uncle Roger and the manor's formidable dowager, Lady Margaret Fitzhugh, it's clear that class prejudice, resentment and secrets threaten to tear the family apart. Is there more to a fatal accident than meets the eye?

Emily soon finds herself in the middle of a family drama redolent of Forster's classic novels, but can she pull off her own masterstroke to catch a killer?