Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who jettisoned her career over an unreliable screenwriter, is now divorced, broke, and come to a ''primitive, untamed northern forest'' on Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian Madisons wishes to write her memoirs. Miss Madison isn't interested in a bestseller. She wants to leave a record of her life, especially of her years with the Canadian Army Nursing Sisters of World War II. Her service in the British and then European theater was filled with triumphs and bitter losses and forever shaped her life. Can Elaine tell her story working with decades of old documents? Settling into the family ''cottage'' and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine rediscovers her love of researching the past. But somehow her project-she soon discovers the first writer Miss Madison hired drowned in the Lake-stirs someone to murder....