"She felt like Lewis Carroll's Alice again, but this time not through the looking glass . . ." That is Leslie Marsh, a young seamstress who loses her mother to a pauper's grave and is then miraculously elevated to fabulous luxury by a maverick uncle she has never met. But she is not long in his isolated mansion before she discovers that her new, glossy, fairy-tale existence conceals sinister depths. Why, she wonders, was it Queenie and not Uncle Walter who invited her? Why should Queenie's rich and handsome son, George Trowbridge, woo her so quickly and so ardently? Why were the servants all hired in the last month? And what about the remarkable valet, Stephen Crawford, who searches through the house in the dead of night?

To add to Leslie's unease, there comes the howl of a nocturnal beast which so terrifies the family that George charges into the frozen night, armed to kill. Lastly, there is the high open window to the locked and secret room in which Rufus Morgate, the builder of the house, is said to have been killed.

In her efforts to separate reality from fantasy, fact from fiction, and guilt from innocence, Leslie suddenly finds herself in far greater danger than those for whom she feared.