Christy Naylor feels as if she is being cut open; her life is wrenched apart when her mother dies and her father's crazed reaction is to gamble. He wins a fish farm in a game of poker and uproots them from their lives in the patchwork of suburbia to live on a couple of watery fields and a lake full of fish fry.

Unsettled and unsure of herself, Christy is seventeen, suffocating and suffering. Mick Fleet, tall, magnetic and overpowering, is irresistible. Christy falls for him, longing for him to hook her out of her sorrow and into his mystery. She knows nothing about him and plunges deep into an intense love affair, blind to the catastrophe he will bring...