It is September 2022. The Queen is dead, and the UK government is in turmoil, the economy close to collapse.

Normally, opinionated Gina Gray would have plenty to say, but she is grappling with her own despair: A dark moon is rising; the world has shrunk to the inside of her head.

So, when her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Freda, doing a weekend job as a chambermaid at a scientific conference in a local college, finds an eminent professor dead in his bed, Gina has no energy for detective work, but when the police start to follow a trail that leads back into her own past, she faces a desperate moral dilemma.

It is Freda, caught up in her own investigation and finding herself at risk, who shakes Gina out of her apathy and into action – to protect Freda and to avenge a very personal crime.