Fran Varady is insolvent, unemployed and, though for the moment she's got the leaky roof of the squat she shares in Jubilee Street over her head, thanks to the attentions of the council eviction department she'll very soon be homeless. Her dreams of becoming an actress, nurtured when her father and grandmother were still alive, seem a long way off. But the quietly resolute Fran, for all her youth and apparent vulnerability, is a survivor. Which her former housemate, Terry, found hanging from the ceiling rose of her room, clearly is not.

Terry, secretive and selfish, was far from popular with the rest of the household, but her death shakes the Jubilee Street Creative Artists' Commune, as the squat residents half jokingly call themselves. And, the more Fran discovers about the death of the young woman whose life briefly intersected with her own, the more she begins to see it was not all it first seemed.