Harry Riley, brash young reporter on a small Sussex paper, came from Brighton but he might as well have come from nowhere. He had no kin, no sense of community; what he did with his spare time was his secret. Moreover, his sneaky investigations into certain local institutions had aroused local ire. When he was found dead at the foot of a cliff, fellow reporter Sheila Tracy was one of the few to mourn him, but she never suspected his death was anything other than an accident.
Even when her suspicions were aroused, quiet respectable Seahaven seemed an unlikely venue for murder, and Sheila pursued her inquiries into Harry's life and the lives of certain local worthies with no great hopes. Then she unearthed a connection between Harry and a crime some two or three years earlier which convinced her that his death had indeed been deliberately contrived. The rest of what she unearthed was even more unexpected, and - for Sheila - deeply disturbing. Would she ever again have the same view of 'a nice place like Seahaven'?

Margaret Hinxman, former film critic of the Daily Mail, puts her knowledge of journalism to good use in this suspenseful story.