When Mrs. Edwina Charles, the famous clairvoyante, gets a letter from a woman whose cards she had read nearly twenty-five years ago, she gets a disturbing feeling that something's very wrong. She remembers her reading for Peggy Baldwin: they'd been interrupted and Mrs. Charles had just enough time to warn her about a hermit and a girl who is clairvoyant. Now Peggy has moved to Michaelmas Cove in Cornwall, where there's both a clairvoyant girl and a hermit who some say is the ghost of an old prior who wanders on the cliffs above the sea.

So Mrs. Charles decides to visit Michaelmas Cove, and it doesn't take a clairvoyante to see that something very odd and very deadly-is going on there. There are strange forces at work, but no one in the village will talk about them. People are dying in Michaelmas Cove, and the powers that be have made Mrs. Charles the prime suspect in the latest murder. But her own extraordinary powers tell her something else: that the killer has targeted her as the next victim…