Winter in the Dordogne: delicious food, ruggedly beautiful scenery, unscrupulous orchid hunters, illegal drugs, a poetic house-breaker, and three mysterious deaths and counting . . .

Expat Montrealer Mara Dunn and orchid-loving Brit Julian Wood are living together in an uneasy, on-and-off way. When bad things start to happen to their friends - first Amélie Gaillard falls mysteriously to her death, leaving behind a husband with Parkinson's who is visited by a murderous apparition, then a local Turkish couple's son disappears and is soon found dead of an overdose - each has a very different way of helping out. So different that each begins to wonder if they are really meant to be together.

But when Julian, with his unerring understanding of the orchid-lover's mind, thinks he has found the link between the local spike in drug traffic and murder, one of them might lose the other - permanently.