first time after moving to Vancouver to attend university, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth (Liz) Grant finds campus and dorm life lonely. She is thrilled when the handsome, charismatic Professor Gilby offers her and Caroline, another student, a summer job doing door-to-door surveys to collect data for his research on elderly people who live alone and their access to medical care. Before long, Liz is using cocaine and embroiled in steamy and complicated sexual relationships with both Gilby and Caroline-who may or may not also be involved with each other.

Years later, while leading a quiet life as a civil servant working with archival material, Liz (who now calls herself Beth), makes a shocking discovery about the real purpose of the data she was innocently collecting all those years ago and that money-big money-was involved. After turning her findings over to the local RCMP detachment, she finds herself drawn into a complex web of crime and police sleuthing she could never have imagined. She also learns that her relationship with Gilby and Caroline was not quite what it seemed. Or was it exactly what it seemed?