Eleven-year-old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown and her life in Ghana, she falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus and her family. But all is not what it seems in the Venus household and Ajuba can only watch as the family tear itself apart. One day the girls find the bones of a dead baby wrapped up in an old coat in the attic of the Venus manor house. Obsessed with the detectives of the American magazine serial TRUE MURDER, the girls set out to find out what happened to the baby and as the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.