Detective Jackson Brodie takes on the case of a girl who disappeared 30 years ago, helps a crime novelist who becomes involved in a road rage incident, investigates the mystery of a novelist's holiday in Russia, and looks for another missing girl after being released from jail.

Depicts country life in late nineteenth-century Oxfordshire through a young woman's experiences in the contrasting communities of Lark Rise, the small hamlet of her childhood, and Candleford, a progressive market town.