While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone.

When Liz Headleand receives a mysterious package full of papers - and a bone - she calmly recognises the handwriting of her old friend, the delicate, reticent, honourable novelist Stephen Cox who had vanished some years earlier. Sifting through the gaps and inconsistencies of memory, she begins to piece together a trail that took Stephen far away - to a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia and a time full of complexity and confusion.