In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student. As the young teacher's sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover's wife, has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime book about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress some years before, set in a nearby town.

Kate becomes fixated on the unsolved crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present. Is it her imagination, or is someone stalking her? Is she caught playing a game where she no longer knows the rules? Has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?