Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still very much alive, and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. But by the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance....

A powerful storm descends upon Cape Cod's Whale Rock the weekend Cassandra Mitchell and David Benjamin are set to wed at The Bluffs, a magnificent Victorian mansion. In the wake of the storm's destruction, three-year-old Lucas Kleister disappears, and the body of small-time drug dealer Lee Chambers is found in a restaurant dumpster. Now there is a murder to solve and a missing child to find.