Steve and Helen Anderson move from their London flat into an isolated old house near the Lod River. Both are strangely drawn to the river, though stories circulate about its dangerously weak banks and powerful undertow. Helen is also drawn to neighbor Matthew Summers, the forbidding village squire and Casanova.

They have moved from urbanity and movement to a silent and brooding landscape dominated by the almost invisible river that runs through it. It is this change that provides the catalyst to an inherently unstable relationship, and a final catastrophe ...

'He has the ability to achieve a mounting kind of tension that rivets the reader' New York Times Book Review