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It is mid-October and unexpectedly cold in Ballynagh, the small Irish village that Torrey Tunet, the young American translator and sometime amateur sleuth, calls home. She has just built a fire of peat and coal to warm her cottage when a window frame collapses, letting in drafts of icy air. Asking around for the services of a carpenter, she hires local teenager Dakin Cameron to do a few repairs. Dakin is an unusually helpful and likable young man with something on his mind. When he receives a threatening phone call at the cottage, Torrey resolves to try to help him. It seems that Dakin is the son of Natalie Sylvester Cameron, a beautiful heiress whose husband died tragically two years before. Dakin is distressed because someone is trying to blackmail Natalie-and even more distressed when the blackmail attempts lead to a case of murder.