Ireland. Winter. Weeks before Christmas, Detective Sergeant Joanne Keane stands at the forested peak of Bawnogue Hill, where the corpse of a skilled forestry worker lies pinned beneath a fallen tree. An accident, but the man's chainsaw and phone lie in the snow at a distance, signs that someone had moved them as he lay freezing to death, and observed his final struggles…A watcher.

Keane, affable but isolated in her husband's home town, exposes the connections between the victim and a conspiracy theorist protestor, a brutalised survivor of childhood bullying, and the local children who strain with their own strange tensions. In this whodunnit debut, Shane Leavy exposes the mess of good and wicked motives that strive within each heart, and his captivating Detective Sergeant Joanne Keane illuminates these motives with reason, holding one aim: to hunt the unknown figure who had watched in pitiless indifference over a dying man.