Julia Almond believes she is special and dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life away from the drab suburbia of her upbringing. Her work in a fashionable boutique in the West End gives her the personal freedom that she craves but escape from her parental home into marriage soon leads to boredom and frustration. She begins a passionate affair with a younger man, which has deadly consequences. Based on the events of a sensational murder trial in the 1920s - the Thompson/Bywaters case - Julia becomes trapped by her sex and class in a criminal justice system in which she has no control. Julia finds herself the victim of society's expectations of lower-middle-class female behaviour and incriminated by her own words. Tennyson Jesse creates a flawed, doomed heroine in a novel of creeping unease that continues to haunt long after the last page is turned.

F. Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958) began a career as a journalist for the Times and the Daily Mail and was one of the few women reporting from the Front during the First World War. She later wrote plays, novels and short stories, and was also a noted criminologist, author of Murder and its Motives.