Set in the London 1978 winter of discontent, with growing racial and class unrest, the ongoing theme of the book is whether Annie was murdered (the narrator's view) or whether she wasn't. Most of Graham Road do little to disguise their satisfaction at her death, and in this environment of growing racial and class unrest, M Ranelagh, the narrator, takes up a solitary and dangerously unpopular defence of the vilification of Mad Annie. So dangerous that M and her husband Sam flee the poisonous climate of England.
Twenty years later the narrator and her husband return from overseas and M now begins acting on her secretly and painstakingly collected research to piece together what really happened. But is it justice for Annie's murder she's after or is it revenge for something entirely different?
