The wedding of their youngest sister, Janet, brings Gwen and Kay home to St. John’s, Newfoundland. While Janet struggles to hide her family’s dysfunction, Kay can’t help but create chaos wherever she goes and Gwen finds herself paralyzed by a past secret. The complicated web of relationships between the sisters, their Aunt Maureen, their absent mother, and Kay’s young daughter Billie, is only illuminated by the wedding. Gwen’s attempts to get Kay to take responsibility for her daughter highlights her own abandonment of her ex, Tom, leading them all to a not-so-perfect storm of a reception.
In 1947 Whitbourne, Newfoundland, Alan Hepditch, a by-the-books but squeamish and somewhat dimwitted criminologist is constantly being tormented by his fellow ranger candidates and his sergeant, Bill O'Mara. Before Hepditch can quit, O'Mara, as a sort of punishment, assigns him to his first posting at Swyer's Harbour, where five sheep mutilations have taken place over the past year. When he arrives in Swyer's Harbour, Hepditch has a more serious crime to investigate, that of the murder of a local, mentally slow woman named Tryphenia Maud Pottle, better known to the locals as Young Triffie.