Alex, the 15-year-old adopted daughter of Tory MP, Richard Travers, is found drowned and with a head injury in a pond in the garden of the family home on the outskirts of a village in Oxfordshire. With the local police force short-handed due to a flu epidemic, two detectives from Scotland Yard are seconded to investigate what they soon discover is a seriously dysfunctional family. At times vivacious and good fun, at others moody and highly emotional, Alex had proved difficult to manage, particularly by Madeleine, the MP's wife, who holds rigid religious beliefs which convinced her and her 17-year-old son, Matthew, that Alex was evil.