On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarret falls in love with a woman he meets by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he leaves his wife and goes to meet Marian, only for her to vanish from his life as mysteriously as she entered it.

Searching for the woman for who he has sacrificed everything, Jarrett comes across a Dorset churchyard full of gravestones of dead Esguards. He also meets a psychotherapist, Daphne Sanger. She too is looking for someone: a former client who believes she is the reincarnation of Marian Esguard, who may have invented photography ten years before Fox Talbot. But why is Marian Esguard unknown to history? And who and where is the woman Jarrett met in Vienna?

Jarrett sets out to solve a mystery whose origins lie amid the magical-seeming properties of early photography. But at the end of his search a trap awaits him. He is caught in a web of deception, woven between the enigmas of the past and the revenges of the present, And there is no way out.