"Freshettes" at Brigid Moore Hall, a girls' hostel in the University of Melbourne, are shocked when new arrival Judith Mornane who announces that she intends to discover her sister's murderer. Her sister, Maureen, had mysteriously disappeared from the hostel the year before, at about the same time that a professor's wife had accidentally drowned. It is left to newly arrived Warden, Mother Paul, and Elizabeth Drew, the Humanities tutor, to draw the police's attention to possibilities they might not have considered.