Carroll Enderby is trying to make some extra money as she wants more than her job at the laboratory can provide, and she is prepared to act outside the law if that is necessary. But when a woman's body is found by a fisherman collecting mussels on a sandbank in the Wash and her colleague, Geraldine Franson, goes missing Carroll finds that she is being drawn into Geraldine's dangerous world. Inspector Campbell and his team are called in to investigate. In his search to unravel the life and death of the body on the sandbank, Campbell soon finds himself examining the lives of the people living and working on this daunting and lonely corner of the Wash.