Beautiful, blue-eyed Magda Lefevre, with her dark hair and even darker past, thinks her physically rewarding marriage to City financier Philip Peters is the answer to many of her problems. But when a Lefevre family feast turns into a confessional meltdown, ugly facts emerge about Magda's birth mother, and a new arrival, in the form of a teenager called Isobel, threatens the whole fabric of her life. Then Philip revisits the scene of a killing in Northern Ireland and Magda's world is turned upside down. Why should accidents of birth - or death - spoil one's happiness? With the action moving swiftly from Philip's luxury flat overlooking the Thames to a farm in Ulster and a humble terrace in the West Midlands, readers of this sharply observed novel will find their sympathies on a roller-coaster ride. As Magda says, 'You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present.' Is the truth of her past going to blight her present life and the new life in front of her?