When a woman turns up drowned on the grounds of a royal estate, Sergeant Keen Dunliffe of Leeds, West Yorkshire, is hoping it's just a case of a drunken skinny-dipping accident. But when the woman turns out to be a historian, whose specialty is eighteenth-century English royalty and politics and who was attending a conference at a local university, it's too much of a public relations nightmare to take lightly.

The mystery deepens when two secretive men from the Met show up and ask Keen to befriend a colleague of the dead woman, Professor Jillie Waltham, in the hopes that she can shed some light on the victim's life and work. With such high ranking government officials interested in the case but unable to tell him why, Dunliffe's rebellious nature might get him into more trouble than ever before his investigation is finished.