Melissa Lamb and her cousin Ernestine are at the centre of the Wild Young Bohemians, an exclusive dining club at Oxford for the beautiful and ambitious. Melissa is in the grip of an obsession. Ernestine, however, mild and practical, does not see through Melissa's ruthless determination to restore her derelict family mansion - a Gothic legacy of lust, greed and death, with a spectacular secret that has slept for a hundred years.