When Kirsten Harbourn is found strangled and naked on her wedding day, DI Wesley Peterson makes some alarming discoveries. Kirsten was being pursued by an obsessed stalker and she had dark secrets that her doting fiance, Peter, knew nothing about. But Kirsten's wasn't the only wedding planned to take place that July day. At Morbay register office, a terrified young girl makes her wedding vows. Days later, her bridegroom is found dead in a seedy seaside hotel. Meanwhile, the discovery of a skeleton unearths connections with an Elizabethan playwright and a rarely performed play that may be a confession to an age-old murder or may cast light on recent mysteries.