A woman, little more than a skeleton, is found hanging in dense woodland outside Bangor, hands bound behind her back. Detective Chief Inspector Michael McKenna and his colleagues, seeking her identity and her killer, become enmeshed in deceit and half-truths, chasing shadows, scratching the poverty-stricken underbelly of life in an area of spectacular beauty, pursued by the malice of women, McKenna's bored and resentful wife wreaking her own havoc.
Jamie Thief, amoral and vicious, a scavenger of human misery, is found with the dead woman's car, and goes into hiding. His death shreads the ugly tapestry of greed and perversion shrouding the woman in the woods, illuminating the darkenss of a marriag gone wrong and its tragic consequences.