The ghosts that haunt us are not always strangers...When his elderly father suffers a stroke, Christopher Beal returns to England.He has no home, no other family. Adrift, he answers an advert for a live-in tutor for a teenage boy. The boy is Lawrence Lundy, who carries with him the spirit of his father, a military pilot - missing, presumed dead. Unable to accept that his father is gone, Lawrence keeps his presence alive, in the big old house, in the overgrown garden. His mother, Juliet, keeps the boy at home, away from the world; and in the suffocating heat of a long summer, she too is infected by the madness of her son.Christopher becomes entangled in the strange household, enmeshed in the oddness of the boy and his fragile mother. Only by forcing the boy to release the spirit of his father can he find any escape from the haunting.