Sara Marriott looks forward to a pleasantly productive stay in the small town where she has come to ghostwrite the memoirs of a well-known general. Recently divorced, she is pleased to find lodging in the home of Althea Cannon, a local widow and longtime friend of General Schofield. Then Sara's attention is abruptly and terribly refocused from past to present by the sudden death of her elderly landlady.

When poison is found to be the cause, suicide is the most comfortable assumption, but circumstances suggest otherwise. Disclosures about the dead woman's plans to change her will cast suspicion on her intriguing family. Becoming embroiled in the problems of Mrs. Cannon's almost disinherited son, her unhappily married sculptress niece, and a pair of precocious children, Sara is haunted by an inexplicable message left on her answerphone only shortly before the violent death.

Before she can make sense of the connection between the message and the murder, a second death strikes unnervingly close. Sara can no longer trust any of her new acquaintances, not even the appealing young man who teaches school and writes mystery novels. But it takes yet another murder before Sara fully understands just how much danger can be stored in an answering machine.