On a midsummer's evening a young Dublin woman, Lucy Dolan, prepares for a showdown that will help make sense of a heart-breaking and brutal atrocity that happened thirteen years earlier, changing her life forever. As she waits for the arrival of the charismatic figure who is the key to the mystery, she recounts her life story - a rich and extraordinary tale spanning two generations of storytellers and deal-makers, fortune-tellers and gamblers, businessmen and warlords, and the people that feared, served and betrayed them. With each twist of this tumultuous story Lucy revisits her childhood and early adolescence - trying to get her head around the things people do in the name of love and hate, greed and desire - and she pieces together afresh the events that led to the night that still haunts her.