Convinced that she is facing death from the illness that has slowly stripped her of her beauty and her career, aging chanteuse Christina Duval has secreted herself in a cliffside castle on the coast of Brittany. She has set for herself the final task of attempting to discover how she has affected the unlikely retinue no gathered around her.

Her husband, Gilbert, a faded womanizer, is accompanied at his wife's retreat by his most recent mistress, a young Parisian posing as a maid. Ernestine, an actress coarsened by her own self-indulgence, is Christina's closest friend and most bitter enemy. Paul Dupuis, a man who, for complex reasons, abandoned his career to serve Christina as secretary and majordomo. And finally, her ward, Darney, who, as a winter storm rages and relationships grow taut, watches helplessly until it seems that only in the tower room of Châtement can she retain touch with reality.

But with the arrival of three men—Christina's son from whom she has long been alienated; Andrew, the young representative of a London publishing house who has been falsely led to believe that Christina will allow him to write her biography; and finally, Christina's brother, an old man who brings with him memories of a past she has tried hard to forget—violence comes to Châtement and murder follows murder, bringing one woman's search for the meaning of her life to a sudden and electrifying conclusion.