Like many eminent writers before him, Fergus Fadden - author of two successful novels - has come as stoop labour to the Hollywood vineyards. Comfortably established in a rented beach house on the Californian coast, he waits tensely for the moguls' verdict on a film-script which, he hopes, will finance an expensive divorce and a new life with the youthful Dani. The morning manifestation in the living-room of his long-dead father is the signal for an army of ghosts, the living and the dead, to rise up from Fergus' Irish past. Between the shattering realities of his day, family, friends, priests, an abandoned fiancée, the incomparable heroine of his boyhood fantasies, and even his younger self appear in disturbingly tangible form to accuse him for his personal and professional unconcern. It is not until that night's moonlight picnic on the seashore that the indictment is finally understood, the penalty exacted.