Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancee Zaneta, Peter has been given a gift of her family's ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It's a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen.

As painter Walter Hartright walks through the wooded dark night to Limmeridge House, she arrives like a heavenly apparition. She is the key figure in a tale of murder, insanity, switched identities and dastardly plots encircling an inheritance, while Hartright and family cousin Marian sleuth out the motivations of the estate's odd, sinister characters.