On Carraig Dubh they say the sea takes and the bog keeps.

For forty years the island believed Bernadette Coll boarded the emigrant boat in a coat the colour of a robin and was swallowed by Boston, the way so many of them were. Then, on a soft April day with the whole island out cutting turf, a spade finds her a mile from her mother's door, whole as the day she went into the ground, a Claddagh ring turned the wrong way on her hand.

Róise Gallagher - shopkeeper, postmistress, and the island's only nurse - has read enough bodies to know this one never saw America. And when a proud old widow is arrested for a crime she did not commit, Róise must do the hardest thing the island has ever asked of her: take a beloved name down off the finest headstone on the hill, and prove a murder against a man nine years in his grave, so that the living can go free and the dead can come home under her own true name at last.

A mystery about the ones who left, the ones who were said to have left, and what a small place does with the truth when it finally comes up out of the ground.