She'd seen faces like that before, but on the television, in films and in the history books. The faces of fanatics, cold and blind to all reason staring back at her. Chloe is a square peg in an increasingly uncomfortable round hole. Brought up by her wildly unconventional grandmother, she's a true free spirit and has never learned to pull her punches. She's just married trainee Church of England clergyman Clifford, and is living at the theological college and trying to figure out what's going on around her. She's had very little connection with formal religion, and has a talent for stepping on all sorts of emotional land-mines with the wives of the other ordinands. That would probably be fine if it wasn't for the fact that her grandmother has inconsiderately died, and left her a house full of exotic souvenirs of her days as a travelling doctor, instructions to track down her father and sister, and what everyone else regards as a really bad attitude. She's also lost her job, her temper, but not the will to live. Chloe's life begins to unravel in ways she could never have imagined as she tries to understand her own background by setting out to find out what became of her sister and father. But trying to integrate her uncompromising approach to life brings her into escalating conflict with the other women of the college, leaving her isolated and friendless. In Clifford's final year of training, Chloe meets the arty, anarchic Isobel and together they concoct a plan whereby the irrepressible Isobel becomes the mole amid the college wives and they start to undermine and sabotage the status quo with a series of practical jokes and psychological warfare that has terrible consequences for Chloe when things go horribly wrong.