When Gautam Dogra is found murdered in his study one afternoon in the small hill station of Brooks Town, the police dismiss it as a relatively simple case. But Charlotte Hyde knows well that a murder never happens in a day – it follows its own timeline. As Kerketta, Charlotte’s old retainer, always said, a murder is written into your life at the very beginning.

As Charlotte begins telling the story of Dogra’s death, it soon becomes clear that his story can only be fully understood in the light of many other stories. Of her estranged daughter, Maddy, of the political climes in which they lived. Of lost hopes and lost loves, of small humiliations and disillusionments and, above all, of the slow incitement to violence that the terror of loss brings into quiet lives.