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Desperate teenager, Faith, flees Arcadia community, the religious cult controlled by their leader, Abe who molests young girls.
Faith’s fear and shame of remaining Abe’s victim, drives her to leave her family to join the Outlanders-a group of rescuers on the outside who have already escaped. Retired Detective Inspector, Ann Grieves, the main protagonist, is summoned by her fiancee, Reverend Thomas Pope, to investigate the allegations of child abuse.
Ann is a quirky, slightly eccentric woman in her early fifties who lives in Cockle Bay West Auckland with her Beagle dog, Scout, an ex-police dog. She and her nephew, Tim Martin, run a private detective business called Calamity Unlimited. They find evidence of child abuse within the community. Tim enters Arcadia undercover as Josh Wilson, an agricultural apprentice. His fiancee is Australian. Seth, the dairy foreman threatens to blow the whistle and alert the police when Eden, his friend’s sister, is molested by Abe and disappears. Ann discovers the lad’s bloated body hanging high in a Pohutukawa tree in surrounding bushland and signals the police team.
A criminal investigation is headed by Ann’s friend and confidante, Detective Inspector Bryce Drummond, who permits her to conduct her own inquiries. Together with Scout, Ann’s trusted ex-police Beagle dog, she probes Seth’s death. The forensic investigation turns up little to nail any of the suspects. But Tim discovers someone has stolen insulin from one of the Pilgrims. He and Ann believe Seth was injected with the substance to induce a semi-comatose state so he could be transported into the bush.
Ann puts Scout to work again scouring the murder scene in the bushland.
The dog finds a Glucagon syringe in the hollow of a tree. Ann knows this drug is used to reverse the affects of insulin overdose. This, together with their knowledge of the stolen insulin vial, convinces her and Tim the killers drugged Seth with insulin before abducting him and gave him Glucagon to rouse him. White and his henchman, Cyrus, confess they accidentally hanged Seth. They only intended to punish him for threatening to blow the whistle on their leader’s deviant behaviour, but their plan backfired. Abe gets a long jail time for manslaughter and sexual abuse of young girls. Cyrus is also jailed for carrying out the deadly deed under Abe’s instructions as his puppet. Abe has an adult son, Caleb, who was brought to NZ from England by his father as a young boy when his parents divorced. His mother eventually reunites with him.
