RETIRED INTELLIGENCE agent Winston Crisp thought his career of delving into dark, unpleasant secrets was long over. He'd forsaken adventure and settled comfortably into the tiny community on Penobscot Island off the coast of Maine. There, he's content to write poems no magazine will publish, gossip with the locals around the pot-bellied stove at the hardware store, and gain weight on his landlady's homestyle cooking. But when the body of a young woman is found, he just can't refrain from asking a few questions; how did she end up frozen in the ice of an abandoned quarry? Whose fingerprints are those on her slender neck? What was her relationship with the son of Senator McKinnison? And why is her beautiful face caked with forty-year-old theatrical make-up? Before long, octogenarian Crisp finds himself caught up in a tangled murder investigation, haunted by a red-headed ghost, and the target of a killer with a strangely twisted mind. His own grip on reality is slipping, and he's losing his will to keep digging. But he's determined not to go to his grave with these questions unanswered...