During an especially cold, rainy May, three families move to the recently opened Ocean Tide community on the coast of Maine. Not long after their arrival, a decaying corpse is found lying in the rough of their beautifully manicured golf course-disrupting the idyllic community. — When a second body is discovered in a fertilizer shed, just yards away from the seventeenth green, the local authorities are puzzled over the sudden rash of dead bodies and their link to Ocean Tide's newest arrivals.

Despite her own misgivings and her husband Alex's warnings, Sarah Deane, an English professor and sometime amateur sleuth, becomes entangled in the investigation. What she uncovers promises to rock the very foundation of the Ocean Tide community.