When renovation work beneath Chester's historic Rows exposes a hand sealed inside a wall, Detective Superintendent Kate Hardwick is called to a scene unlike anything she has encountered.
Behind the bricks lie three murdered women, each positioned against a different layer of the city's past-Roman stone, medieval masonry and modern brick. Beside them crouch grotesque stone figures: one covering its mouth, one its ears and one its eyes.
The newest victim had been investigating the disappearance of seventeen-year-old Emily Bell, who vanished from an exclusive school more than twenty years earlier. As Kate follows the trail, she uncovers altered records, missing evidence, a funeral held without a body and a circle of former friends bound by a secret none of them has ever fully escaped.
Someone has spent years preserving the truth beneath Chester.
Now the wall has opened, the dead are beginning to speak-and the person who buried them may still be watching.