Twelve-year-old Bonnie MacDonald ? the stepdancing, fiddling youngest member of Cape Breton's famed Clan Donnie family band ? is liked by everyone in the kind of town where everyone knows each other. After Bonnie vanishes from a family party, no one knows what to think ??there was no stranger spotted lurking around, but no one thinks for one minute that Bonnie ran away. Bonnie is a cousin of Maura MacNeil, who is married to lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins. Maura offers her husband's legal services to members of the clan as the police and family hunt for the missing girl. But fame attracts some strange characters and Clan Donnie has its groupies. So, it turns out, does Monty.
Monty and Maura's daughter, Normie, is much closer to the action as she gets to know Bonnie's cousins and friends, learns things she wished she had never learned, and has nightmares ? visions? ? that bring her no closer to finding Bonnie. Normie's fears intensify as she spends time with her spooky great-grandmother Morag, who makes no secret of the fact that she senses the presence of evil in their village ? the kind of evil RCMP Sergeant Pierre Maguire came to Cape Breton to escape. Pierre thought this island would be a little easier on the head than the organized-crime beat in Montreal. But he finds a vein of darkness running beneath the beauty and vibrant culture of Cape Breton. And he learns that this isn't the only dark passage in the Clan Donnie family history.
