Twelve-year-old Bonnie MacDonald — the beloved stepdancing, fiddling youngest member of Cape Breton’s famed Clan Donnie band — vanishes after a family party. No one thinks Bonnie ran away. Maura MacNeil, cousin to Clan Donnie, offers her husband’s legal services to the family as the police search for the missing girl. But fame attracts some strange characters, and Clan Donnie has its groupies. So, it turns out, does lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins.

Monty and Maura’s daughter, Normie, is much closer to the action and, as she gets to know her cousins, learns things she wishes she never had. She has nightmares — visions? — that bring her no closer to finding Bonnie. Her spooky great-grandmother senses the presence of evil in their village — the kind of evil RCMP Sergeant Pierre Maguire left the big city to escape. 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.