Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside town, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son and an aging Labrador, both at the discretion of his ex-wife Julia. It's a picturesque village filled with vacationers and well-off locals, but there's something darker behind the scenes: a quietly, wildly successful business in human trafficking. Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, would seem unrelated, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network, and back across the path of his old friend Reggie, now a police detective with her own way of doing things. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking novel by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.