Irving Levy has an incurable illness and is desperate to find someone to whom he can leave his considerable property. His closest relative would be his little sister, Miriam, but she vanished without a trace at a fairground in the 1960s. When Irving learns there may be more to her disappearance than he thought, he enlists private investigator Lee Arnold and his assistant, Mumtaz Hakim, to help uncover the truth.

Their investigation takes them from the faded attractions of East London's Barking Park Fair to the chaotic world of post-Second World War Europe, where the secrets of the past haunt the present and few people are what they seem.