York, England: 1940 'An unsuitable job for a woman...' When her husband goes 'missing in action', Jemma James returns to the city of her birth to set up a private detective agency with her best friend, Roberta 'Bobbie' Baker, with whom she shares a passionate love of Golden Age crime fiction. These two enterprising young women soon find themselves embroiled in a series of mysterious cases, shadowing blackmailers and bigamists, and investigating the perplexing history of a wealthy young woman who seems determined to wipe out her past. And it's not long before they stumble across an unsolved murder. But the dead don't stay dead for long in historic York. As the 'phoney war' draws to a close, and the sky above the soaring twin towers of the twelfth century Minster darkens with menace, Jemma learns that even she is not above suspicion in wartime Britain.