Will's first thought when he saw the man's face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out.

When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, are called upon to investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay Cambridge academic, their first thoughts are off an ill-judged sexual encounter, of rough trade gone wrong.

But as their investigation widens, their attention focusses on the biography Bryan was writing about the life and death of fifties film star, Stella Leonard, whose death from drowning, when the car she was driving skidded mysteriously off a lonely Fenland road, uncannily echoed the climax of her most notorious film, Shattered Glass.

With Bryan's journalist sister egging them on, and bringing herself into mortal danger as she conducts her own investigation, Will and Helen gradually peel away the secrets of a family blighted by a lust for wealth and power and its own perverted sexuality.