A photographer whose shots of New York's punk scene in the seventies earned her fame, caché, and a cultish kind of cool, Cass Neary has spent much of her life in the dark, watching and waiting. But 30 years later she is alone, adrift and falling rapidly into oblivion. So when an old acquaintance asks her to interview a fellow photographer - a notorious recluse who lives on an island off the Maine coast - she accepts. There, she learns about a decades-old crime that is still claiming new victims - and comes to realise that her days of living dangerously are not over yet.