Innes? Innes, it's Isabella. Isabella Velasco ... Don't ask me how I got hold of you ... We live quite close, you know, would you believe? God, you sound just the same. Just the same! ... I need to talk to you ... see you. Can you call me as soon as you can? Innes Haldane, who as a teen was deemed out of control both physically and sexually, has made every attempt to put that stage of her life behind her. Until a voice from the past leaves a message on her answering machine and an obituary with a familiar name interrupts her quiet life. In 1977, Innes was one of seven dysfunctional teenagers incarcerated in the Unit, an avant-garde psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Edinburgh. She and her fellow inmates -- Danny, a rapist by age fourteen; Carrie, whose mother's boyfriends always found her more attractive than her drug-addict mother; Lydia, who as a grossly overweight teenager retreated into a severely manic-depressive world; Simon, whose domineering mother blamed him for the death of his twin; Alexandra, a member of thesocial upper class who revolted against her parents; and Isabella, who suffered at the hands of a prominent yet highly abusive father and a vain, jealous mother -- were forced into one another's lives, exposed to one another's pasts, and now share a collective memory. Since then, they have spent their adult lives trying to forget the unspeakable acts that sent them to the Unit and the terrible secret that occurred behind its walls. But a murderer