After learning of a large inheritance, Todd moves his wife, small child, and adolescent stepdaughter, Alice, from their cramped SOHO apartment to the wisteria-draped Georgian town of Congreve. The heir to a small-town banking fortune, Todd knows all too well the dangerous snare of greed, but the promise of the good life is too much for the struggling artist to resist. However, when the pressures of an industry he doesn't understand become too much for him to bear, he finds comfort in liquid escape. Barely thirteen, Alice does her best to understand the dark flashes of violence creeping into her new life. She tries to ignore her new Aunt who only has eyes for younger half sister, and keeps a watchful eye on her troubled cousin, but the dark secret hidden behind the gabbled upstairs window of the Broderick mansion is about to set fire to her once-fairytale existence. In Athena Alexis' southern gothic tale of greed, incest, and murder, money may be the root of all evil, but truth is the greatest sin of all.