Outside Edinburgh, private investigator Jackson Brodie is working his latest case. He's been hired by Gary Moore to find out if his wife Michelle is having an affair. While driving home, photographic evidence in hand, Brodie's car stalls, leaving h... (more)im to be nearly hit by an old woman driving by. The situation goes from bad to cataclysmic when her car veers off the road onto train tracks, and Brodie must try to save her and himself from an oncoming train. Delirious in the hospital, offering cryptic words to former colleague DI Louise Munroe, Brodie encounters his unlikely rescuer — Reggie, a young girl who saved him at the scene. Enamored with her new friend, Reggie also has a case for him. Dr. Joanna Hunter, who employs Reggie as a nanny, has vanished. Her husband Neil brushes it off as a holiday visit to family, but Reggie knows Joanna had no family. The wounded Brodie is drawn into the case, one that will call on all of his now diminished faculties. But Brodie is hindered by the fact that somehow his wallet was misplaced at the train crash, and now he holds the identification for one Andrew Jones, also apparently at the crash site. Some reckless driving and an arrest aside, Brodie and Reggie discover more unnerving clues in the Hunter case, a connection to an older case, and come to the daunting realization that Hunter may be in imminent danger. But the increasingly frantic Gary Moore isn't interested in Brodie's other pursuits — he simply wants to find his wife, know the truth, and will do anything to get it.