After the murder of her partner, marine archaeologist Meghan Polglaze has left her old life behind, finding sanctuary in a remote Cornish cottage and cleaning holiday cottages to pay the bills. When a brand new, state-of-the-art yacht wrecks on the Lizard Peninsula, she views it as likely a tragic accident, but still a minor one in the history of shipwrecks off the Cornish coast. To those locals struggling to make ends meet, it was one of ‘them there overblown super-yachts, not fit for purpose and owned by some bugger with more money than sense’. Those who earned their living from the sea indulged in detailed speculation about how the tragedy could have occurred, spending many an hour around firesides in coastal taverns remembering shipwrecks of the past, both recent and historic. For the lifeboat crew it was a far from ideal outcome and weighed heavily until the next shout that saw them save lives and avert tragedy. All said, there would have been little motivation to remember the wreck as much more than a blip on the radar, as the ebb and flow of life’s reassuring monotony returned.

But then the body washed up, and Meghan is confronted with far darker forces than her grief.