Unwilling – or unable – to speak, the only person she seems to trust is the young officer who rescued her, Detective Sergeant Lucy Black. Soon afterwards, DS Black is baffled to find herself suddenly moved from a high-profile case involving a kidnapping of another girl, a prominent businessman’s teenage daughter.

At home, Black is struggling with caring for her increasingly unstable father, and trying to avoid conflict with her frosty mother – who also happens to be the Assistant Chief Constable. As she tries to identify the unclaimed child, Black begins to realize that her case and the kidnapping may be linked by events from the grimmest days of the country’s recent history – events that also defined her own troubled childhood.