Twenty years ago, Jane Hudson fled the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. The week before her graduation, in that sheltered wonderland, three lives were taken, all victims of suicide. Only Jane was left to carry the burden of a mystery that has stayed hidden in the depths of Heart Lake, and now she has returned to the school as a Latin teacher, recently separated and hoping to make a fresh start with her young daughter. But in Carol Goodman's "gothic and elegant page-turner" (Boston Globe from 2002, young, troubled girls are beginning to die again, and the shattering truth slowly floats to the surface.