You never know what the sea will give you ... or what it will take back.

When Mair McCrae follows her island tradition and hunts for a husband cast up on the beach, she has no notion that the naked, half-drowned man she rescues is not just Captain Michael Dawson, heir to a major shipping firm, but that he's obsessed by a 'ghost ship' carrying golden cargo.

On Big Henry Island women make the decisions and knit the patterns that mark a man as their own. But Big Henry is also a volcano, and threatening to erupt. Yet when Mair agrees to accompany Michael home, she finds that the Australian comfort he promised has a danger just as real: a social system that tries to keep women confined to small roles at the edges of men's lives.

And as Michael hunts for the 'Ghost' in his revolutionary new steamship, a string of mysterious deaths upends Mair's new life in Sydney.

Who is the murderer, and why is Mair the only one who realises what is happening?