Free spirits or conflicted souls? Three friends embark on a journey but where they end up is their choice.

You would expect when you divorced a woman, it meant she would go away. Not so for Eliot, self-made businessman, whose faithless ex-wife is pursuing him once more. She seeks not his heart but a job for her fawned-upon son by a later marriage. But neither she, nor soft-hearted Eliot, suspect the menace that lurks behind the debts the son has accrued. Mike, an ex-soldier, for better or worse decisive in word and deed, is newly remarried but too euphoric to notice how mention of his silly wife kills conversation. And their friend Chris, a professor of history, is toiling deep in error at an official eulogy for his beloved and famous uncle, unknowing of the detestable role his uncle played at reducing his own daughter to madness.

On reaching London, each man will have to face his own demons and decisions. Their voyage down the waters of the Thames has reflected back their lives in ways that force them to perceive a wider horizon. But will each of them break free of the past or be dragged down and overwhelmed by his own history?

While working at publishing firms including Penguin, Secker and Macdonald, Sue Webb found herself sitting on both sides of the editorial desk, as author of two sagas, a social comedy and a psychological thriller. Losing a pension to fraudster Robert Maxwell also impelled her into a busy career as a ghostwriter. She lives in London and parties in Deal.