The shadowy world of shifting stepparents and seedy refuges for runaway teenage and young adult parents of the post WWII Britain has many secrets best left buried. For instance, only elderly Pat Dickens knows the enmeshed filial backgrounds of three thirty-something women professionals: Sharon Rains who heads an employment agency that does more than recruit for labour; Mary Thompson who has her way from sleazy East End back streets right to the corridors of Whitehall; and Marion Audrey, a devoted single mother with a demanding role in her family business. They are her arsenal against Burton Macdonald for a half century of lost love.
Enters Alex Mwenda, a stranger with a mysterious past and a hand for children; and Marions are not spared. Soon, she is torn between her faith and the new bliss, unaware that the children are in the eye of a storm. But when they are abducted, she can only tell the man who now loves them more than he loves her. The unlikely warrior loses control in the search for the children that leads to the dense Savernake Forest where lie many other victims of paedophilia and human trafficking.
