Pat Riordan's colleague Joe dies unexpectedly in hospital following a fall. He is approached by Kate, the grieving widow, at the funeral to look into the death as she feels it is suspicious due to a letter she found among his belongings.

Riordan is a university lecturer who was supposed to help Joe and another colleague Phil set up a new syllabus which would involve getting students to investigate missing person cold cases.

Instead, Riordan, the teacher turned amatuer sleuth, is once again drawn into the middle of a murder investigation. The connections he makes, which he comes to call the cues, take him into the dark underbelly of the college town he thought he knew and the powerful forces behind it.

This is the third book in the Pat Riordan Mystery Series