Eleanor Anderson's comfortable and well-ordered life is completely shattered when her husband Davis, the dependable and much respected village doctor, disappears. A few days later he is found dead, apparently the victim of a heart attack, and speculation is stilled as family, friends and patients akin feel a kind of relief at knowing the worst.

But genuine grief at their bereavement gives way to angry bewilderment when a post-mortem reveals that the man they thought they knew so well, the man they all depended on, had taken his own life, for no obvious reason. And Eleanor discovers, in the uneasy company of her ungracious son, that all she had assumed and lived by has been false...