When the brilliant young painter Marianne Glass is found dead in her snow-covered Oxford garden, Rowan Winter, once her closest friend, knows it wasn't an accident. Rowan's pursuit of the truth takes her into every corner of her old friend's life, from Bohemian East London to the professional art world in which Marianne made her name. The deeper she goes, the more she is convinced that something is terribly wrong. Is someone breaking in to Marianne's house? Who is the man who watches at night? And what is the involvement of Michael Cory, the intense American painter with at least one other dead woman in his past?