In her family's eyes, naval officer's daughter Verona North was all a girl should be at nineteen - talented, brave and attractive, with the world opening out in front of her. But only a few months after leaving home to study art in London, she is found hanging in her family boathouse in Devon - apparently a suicide.It seems that the perfect daughter had plunged rapidly into left-wing politics and from respectability to drugs and depravity. Her father Ben has no doubt who's to blame for that - his cousin the suffragette, Nell Bray. Nell is sure she's not responsible, and yet...A sense of guilt at not paying more attention to Verona sets her on a trail from the Bohemian life of art students in Chelsea to darker and more dangerous places in a world heading for war.Nell discovers that Verona had even more secrets than expected, and some of them involved people who wouldn't let the girl's life - or Nell's either - stand in their way.
