At a wedding party in Cornwall, Chris Napier, the bride's uncle, is accosted by a drunken, disheveled, and evidently distraught intruder. The man turns out to be Chris's childhood friend Nicky Lanyon, whose father was hanged for the murder of Joshua Carnoweth-Chris's great-uncle and the man behind the Napier family's inherited state of affluence. Pleading his father's innocence, Nicky commits suicide, forcing Chris to test the truth of his friend's conviction. The conduct of more than one member of his own family begins to dog his hesitant footsteps into a past slowly darkening with the shadows of corruption, greed, lies, child abuse, and good old-fashioned revenge.