The Place of a Skull puts a different twist on the old eternal triangle. After losing her whole family in the London blitz of 1940, fifteen-year-old Jessica Smith is sent to stay with a young married couple in the city of Gloucester, in the West of England. Both spouses, one a nurse and the other a naval officer on a few days' leave, fall in love with her, and the ensuing tangle is played out against the background of the Battle of Britain.

Woven into this story is the investigation, twenty-five years later, of a skeleton found under the foundations of a burned out science building at the Nave School in Gloucester. The investigation leads to the untangling of the wartime story, and a kind of resolution, if not exactly a happy ending.