Kate Thomas was beautiful, intelligent, witty, passionate and sexy. Now, at the ripe old age of ninety-nine, she is trapped in a hospital ward of sad, mad and bad old women. She escapes by playing to herself the video of her life.

What a life it has been. Her six marriages have ended in suicide, a husband's adultery, another husband's deportation as a dangerous alien, a union dispute, a murder, and a natural death. But Kate's journey through the twentieth century is also a search for the truth - about life, death, and which of her three sons murdered her fifth husband.

This is a novel rich in memorable characters, from Kate's narrow but loving Welsh family to the wild members of an artists' colony in Cornwall; from Midland piston manufacturers to an investigative journalist whose own life cannot bear investigation.