Innes? Innes, it's Isabella. Isabella Velasco ...'
A simple message on an answer machine. But one that made Innes Haldane's blood run cold. Isabella Velasco was a name from a past that Innes had tried hard to forget. For in 1977 both had spent a fateful year at the Unit, an experimental home for dysfunctional teenagers in Edinburgh. Now, after almost three decades, Isabella is trying to make contact. But before she can reach her, Innes learns that Isabella has committed suicide. And shock quickly turns to fear when she hears that another former patient has also recently killed himself. Has some dark event from 1977 finally come back to haunt them all?

On a deserted London street late one evening in 1980, the corpse of a beautiful woman is left brutally slashed in the gutter. Assigned to solve the case, Detective Smallbone quickly recognizes the girl as a tabloid darling and star in the making. But the killer left no clues and the girl's past is a strange blank. All investigation proves fruitless until the case takes a surprising turn.
Elsewhere, in a quiet and secretive household, a little boy called Kit is growing up with his young mother. A natural outsider, he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. With the passage of time, he remains disturbed and disconnected, until as a young man he decides to come to the city and make sense of himself. His quest leads him to Detective Smallbone, whom he becomes convinced can help him. Both are forced to confront long-buried truths about their pasts, and a forgotten case from the 1980s takes a final, bitter twist.
Set across the years of 1977, 1980, 1984 and the present day, Francesca Weisman brilliantly captures the mood of those times. Her debut novel brings to life the world of outsiders in the city - those set apart by broken families, mental illness or disillusionment. In following the paths of Kit, Smallbone and the dead girl, it explores the breaking apart of generations and how coming to terms with the past can lead to either redemption or disaster.