Despite being subtitled "A Mystery", Ken Edwards' third novel is no conventional crime story. An old and vulnerable woman has gone missing, and a private detective, Phidias Peralta, an illegal resident in a business park near the run-down port of Deadmans Beach, has been hired by her nephew to find her. His assistant, Lucy, is more concerned with her seven-year-old son who is failing at school - but she too is drawn into the quest to try to solve a mystery for which there appears to be no single solution.