Ethel Weir's killer is never found, though the young man who came across her body was at one point due to hang. Testifying on his behalf was Parley Burns, schoolteacher and 'gentleman sadist', whose attentions unsettle and alarm the girls in his charge. When reporter Connie Flood arrives to cover the story, she receives a nasty shock: in her late teens she taught alongside Parley in another town, where a female pupil also met a tragic and mysterious end. Years later, it is Connie's niece who pieces together what happened and stumbles into an unexpected passion of her own...