Award-winning author Anne Emery is back with another Collins-Burke team-up The students at Father Brennan Burke's choir school have written a two-act play about the Halifax Explosion of 1917. The last thing Burke expects is a series of threats against his school and his students, designed to make sure they never perform act two. Then the body of a young woman, Trudi Ebbett, is found strangled in Halifax. A junior hockey player, a friend of one of the students, is the last person known to have seen her alive and is suspected of the murder. Lawyer Monty Collins, hired to represent him, cannot find anyone with a motive for killing Trudi. But Monty's daughter Normie, who is a student at the school and one of the authors of the script, joins her dad and Father Burke as they look deeper into the case. And they begin to suspect that the death is somehow linked to the threats against the play and the events of 1917. But how could something that happened so long ago be a motive for murder in the 1990s?