A baby boy is found beaten to death, in the sand dunes in Gweedore, in the summer of 1989. The murder weapon is a ball-peen hammer. Sarah Joyce, recently heavily pregnant and with no baby to show, becomes the prime suspect and is arrested. Working in a male-dominated workplace in nineteen-eighties Ireland has its problems for Detective Kate Francis a.k.a. Frankie. From the outset, she encounters the hostility of the local sergeant, the curmudgeon...