At a wedding party in Cornwall in the summer of 1981, Chris Napier is shocked to recongnise a dishevelled intruder as his childhood friend Nicky Lanyon, whom he has not seen since his father, Michael Lanyon, was hanged for the murder of Chris's great-uncle, Joshua Carnoweth, in 1947. It was the inheritance of old Joshua's fortune that led the then humble Napier family to their present state of affluence. When Nicky subsequently hangs himself, Chris sets out on a journey into his own and others' memories of the tragic events of 34 years before. Driven on by Nicky's firm belief in his father's innocence, he begins to doubt the official version of those events and to question the conduct of several members of his own family. Then other present-day mysteries begin to dog his footsteps into the past and soon his search for the truth becomes a desperate struggle for his own survival.