How far would you go to protect the people you love?

The day Marianne Glass falls to her death, Rowan Winter hasn't spoken to her in ten years. Yet Rowan knows it couldn't have been an accident as everyone insists. Marianne, once her closest friend, had paralyzing vertigo: she would never have gone so close to the roof's edge.

Marianne—and the whole Glass family—once meant everything to Rowan. For a teenage girl, motherless with a much-absent father, this warm, lively family represented a world of opportunity. And in large-hearted, feminist Jacqueline Glass, Rowan found the mother she longed for.

But Rowan knows little of Marianne's adult life, which she must now investigate if she wishes to know the truth of her death. Her search takes her from Bohemian east London to the polished professional art world where Marianne made her name as a painter. She encounters a trio of men in mourning: James Emory, Marianne's gallerist and boyfriend; Peter Turk, a one-hit-wonder singer who had long pined for her; and an American portraitist with at least one other dead woman in his past. And Rowan again becomes entangled with the Glasses: Jacqueline and her relationship-guru husband, Seb, and Adam, Marianne's gentle brother.

But the deeper Rowan goes, the more sinister everything seems. And a truth from the past only Rowan knows makes her worry about her own fate . . .