Honoria Potterton-Phipps is a dog lover. She is also the heiress to a vast fortune, but when her father threatened to cut her off unless she went to university, she took Criminology and never looked back. Now she finds herself embroiled in the close community of Newton Lauder, which is far from the idyllic rural village it seems and the only thing more worrying than the condition of her new Labrador, is the body hunched in a rowing boat, riddled with bullet wounds. Solving a murder is hard enough when your superiors don't take you seriously because you're a woman, none of the locals will speak to an outsider and there are two men in your life, but it's even harder with an ex-guide dog to retrain and another to nurse through pregnancy. For D.S. Potterton-Phipps, however, it may just be that her dog has a few leads of its own.