The bombing of a U.S. embassy building in Amman, Jordan, has left cultural affairs officer, Ally Templeton, wounded, both physically and emotionally, and without a job and a fiance. On top of that, her eccentric, man-hater mother, Miranda, a former personal assistant to major symphony conductors, for the third time has tried to burn down the scaled-down replica of a Transylvanian castle she has been living in in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia. Ally, still reeling from personal tragedy, returns to Virginia to a mother who is fading away, a mystery of disappearing men, and a rekindling of the question of who her father was. Determined to take control of her life, Ally decides to restore the castle and to do the contracting herself. Subcontracting, however, brings her a pair of men, one older and one younger, vying for her attention and affection, each of whom has issues of his own that threaten to entangle Ally ever deeper into increasingly more sinister mysteries.