Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication her father has silently moved to another city & her serene sister rarely notices anything All of them are still suffering from the shocking & mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier & it seems to Harriet that the family may never recover So inspired by Captain Scott Houdini & Robert Louis Stevenson she sets out with her only friend Hely to find Robin's murderer & punish him But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dark & dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town