Seen-it-all New York detective Frank Keller is unsettled - he has done twenty years on the force and could retire, and he hasn't come to terms with his wife leaving him for a colleague. Joining up with an officer from another part of town to investigate a series of murders linked by the lonely hearts columns he finds he is getting seriously and possibly dangerously involved with Helen, one of the main suspects.
In 1935 Toronto, Jane Stuart's mother has taken ill, and the two of them have temporarily moved in with her rich, snobbish grandmother, where Jane is verbally abused and her mother bullied. Jane is forced into a private academy, in which the other girls tell her that her father, whom Jane believes to be dead, is actually alive. Soon after, Andrew Stuart sends word that he would like to meet his long-lost daughter, so Jane is sent by train to Bright River to stay with him, where she encounters an old mystery that she must help her father overcome, new friends, and the chance to bring her father and mother back together again.