For vicar’s wife Dorothea Cassidy, Thursdays were special. Every week she would look forward to the one day she could call her own. But one Thursday in June was to be more special than any other...As the small town of Otterbridge prepares for its summer carnival, Inspector Stephen Ramsay begins a painstaking reconstruction of Dorothea's last hours. He soon discovers that she had taken on a number of deserving cases – a lonely old woman, a disturbed adolescent, a compulsive gambler, a single mother with a violent boyfriend – and even her close family have their secrets. It is not until a second body is discovered that Ramsay starts to understand how Dorothea lived – and why she died.