Family secrets permeate this ninth entry in the award-winning mystery series set in the sultry South Carolina Lowcountry. Private investigator Bay Tanner is hired by a young mother desperate to locate her estranged family. Joline Eastman's daughter is dying of leukemia, and all other sources for a bone-marrow transplant have been exhausted. A yellowing photograph and a handful of wartime letters are the only clues she has to offer. But it's what she's not willing to share that may hold the ultimate solution to saving her daughter's life. Meanwhile, Bay has her own family to worry about. A phone call from her aging father's companion and caretaker sends her rushing to the hospital. A few whispered words, uttered in a moment of semi-conscious confusion, shatter her world and launch Bay on a quest that will redefine everything she thought she knew about herself. With time running out--perhaps for her father as well as the girl--Bay struggles to untangle the web of secrets and lies surrounding both her own family past and that of the dying child . . . until she encounters the strange women of Covenant Hall, who may well hold the key to everything.