Since the disappearance of her husband seveteen years before, Jane Mannion has lived a life of seclusion on the cornish coast with her children, David and Vanessa and a macabre old woman called Ellen. Suspected by local gossips of poisoning her husband (her mother was also a suspected poisoner) she shuns village society and extends a grudging welcome to her sons fiancee Maureen and her father. This last is a lawyer with a firm belief in hereditary, and he wants to make a through check of his future son-in-law's family history. When a body is found in a disused mine shaft on the moors he discovers more than he has bargained for...|4 women, 4 men
