Culchet is everyone’s idea of the idyllic Lake District village, with geese on its tree-shaded green and friendly, well-behaved residents going quietly about their business: Bart Milburn is doing up the Old Hall, the gourmet chef at the pub is preparing for an anniversary party, her friend Alice in the back garden is reviewing a crime thriller, its violence the very antithesis of Culchet as it dozes through an early heat wave.

Then, without warning, that peace is shattered. Two deaths occur within a short space of time, both too sudden and unusual to be deemed accidents. And when five-year-old Kim Butler disappears, everyone knows what that means - there has to be a kidnapper, or worse, living a seemingly respectable life in the village, pulling the wool over all their eyes. Panic erupts, vigilante groups are formed and quietly, insidiously, blackmailers come out of the woodwork.

So it turns out that in this pretty, sleepy village where nothing ever happens, volcanic passions are waiting to erupt - driven by a lust for power, for possessions, and for merciless and fatal love.