Roz and her long-distance lover, Alan Stewart, plan to spend an idyllic and much needed holiday together saling from Maine's Northeast Har bor to the west side of Penobescot Bay. Their plans get sidetracked when, en route to a picnic on a semi-deserted island, they discover a dead body lying on the beach. Although the authorities are quick - perhaps too quick--to label the death accidental, Roz and Alan are less convinced and the two become involved in uncovering the truth.

Encountering an assortment of colorful characters (including a millionaire playboy yachtsman and a salty old sea dog) and an even more curious set of clues (including a botancial plant press), Rox and Alan rely on both intellect and instinct to unravel a mystery that has roots in a family rivalry going back several generations.

Sara, the narrator of the six interlocked stories in this novel, is a woman whose life has been notably marked by diaster in her immediate family: the early death father - inexplicable and cruelly taken away by a heart attack in a distant city: the recurrent madness suffered by her mother in the wake of that death; the sudden onset of a protracted illness that threatens the life of her husband. How Sara survives shocks and crises as she moves through her own life as daughter, wife, and mother - the illusions she discards, the strengths she finds, the wounds she learns will never heal - forms the matter of stories and urgent as life and death.