It had only been a chance remark at a funeral but what Andrea Yorke overheard that afternoon, to be followed by a solicitor's letter asking her to contact them to fulfil a contractual obligation, were to change her life completely. At the meeting she learns that she had been adopted at an early age and that both her natural parents were dead, the father having died in prison after being wrongly convicted of the murder of Brian Darby, an influential entrepreneur - the mother in an accident during the trial. The solicitor passes over a number of items left in safe keeping until Yorke's twenty-sixth birthday. Amongst them are a chapter from a manuscript written by Darby detailing a massacre of innocent villagers that had occurred during the Malaya emergency in the nineteen fifties when raw conscripts were fighting communist insurgents, and personal letters from her father. Convinced that the manuscript is a vital piece of evidence and determined to find out the truth Yorke starts to delve into the background of what had been written and the court case but is disturbed and alarmed when the people she was hoping to contact start to die in strange circumstances. When more people are violently killed she realises that someone seems determined to stop her finding out the truth. Unable to tell anybody of her fears, not knowing who to trust she is forced to seek out the person responsible and discovering that people are not all that they seem learns that truth is easily corrupted and there is a fine line between honesty and deceit as well as between friendship and hatred.