When Irish-American genealogist Erin Callahan boards a red-eye to Belfast, she's chasing roots, not trouble. Her grandmother Bridie's stories of Portbradden - a wind-scoured village of whitewashed cottages clinging to the Antrim coast like barnacles on a hull - have lived rent-free in Erin's heart for thirty years. Now Bridie is gone, leaving behind a locked tin box of letters, a photograph of a man nobody will name, and a cottage-turned-B&B run by a cousin Erin has never met. She comes looking for the past. The past, it turns out, has been waiting for her. Portbradden is buzzing with preparations for its legendary St. Patrick's Day céilí when Erin arrives: bunting going up, fiddles being tuned, old grudges being carefully folded and put away - or so it appears. But the night of the céilí ends with raised voices behind the thick stone walls of The Stag & Shamrock, and by morning, beloved publican Séamus Doyle is dead. The Guards call it a fall. Erin isn't so sure. Séamus had just unearthed a century-old land deed that could rewrite ownership of half the village, including the clifftop acreage where a developer wants to build a luxury hotel. Erin must decode Bridie's cryptic letters and follow a trail of clues to figure out who in this village of seventy souls loved a dead man's secrets enough to kill for them. And she must do it before someone decides that one American genealogist has asked one question too many.