GP Harriet Lament has a superstition: that the first few hours of a new year set the tone for the coming twelve months. And 1998 does not begin well.

For during a New Year's Eve party Harriet is called away on an emergency night visit fatefully leaving her husband Robin to meet the alluring Janina ...

Harriet's patient that night is Reuben Carnforth, an old man who lives on the edge of the forest. As he is taken to hospital for the last time, Reuben begs for Harriet's help. But his plea has nothing to do with his illness: a decade earlier his six-year-old granddaughter Melanie vanished. His final wish is for her disappearance to be solved.

Two months later, Harriet's marriage is over. As she struggles to overcome her own heartache and that of her daughter Rosie, Harriet finds herself becoming obsessed by the image of a child in a red dress wandering lost in the woods. With Reuben's dying words still clear in her mind, she vows to find the body - and the killer of the little girl they called Melanie Toadstool …