Josie Price is a cool and isolated narrator of life, who has spent much of her emotional energy on the Haddeley family. Following the death of Alice Haddeley, whom Josie loved almost as a daughter, Josie has lived a secondary life with Alice’s widower and new wife. She is entwined in their lives and in her career selling Egyptian tomb relics, but when an unsettlingly ambivalent boy appears claiming to be Alice’s son, he stirs up an emotional dust-storm. A fiercely powerful story of disturbing the past.
Josie Price has given up much of her life for the sake of the wealthy Haddeley family. She works with them, lives with them and knows their secrets. So when a young man, Luke, appears and claims, shockingly, to be the son of Kit Haddeley's late wife Alice, Josie tries to help the Haddeleys come to terms with the family ghosts they hoped had been laid to rest. But Luke's arrival casts shadows on both the past and the future. Above all it is the ghost of Alice Haddeley which hangs most heavily over the family. Through Luke, she seems to demand to be both mourned and revenged. With her intimate knowledge of the family past, it is Josie who holds the key to the mystery of Alice, and it is Josie, beset by guilt, who must resolve the destructive inheritance which Luke brings in his wake.
