Lively Joyce Conway is happy with her life: her boyfriend Conor loves her, she enjoys her job behind the scenes at the local radio station and her relationship to father could not be better. But everything is turned upside down after she has an accident requiring a blood transfusion. She subsequently wakes up with memories that are not hers.

High-flying solicitor Jane Kennedy returns to the seaside town she left as a teenager to take up the post of coroner, becoming an advocate for the dead as she investigates sudden, violent or unexplained deaths.