The canal that runs through the centre of Sheffield used to carry the industrial freight for the steel industry is being renovated for leisure pursuits, but away from the city centre developments, the canal is overgrown, run down and deserted. An arts trust has established a small but innovative gallery in one of the old warehouses by the canal, and Eliza Eliot, the curator, sees her career about to take off when she's given the opportunity to show the latest exhibition by well-known artist Daniel Flynn. The exhibition is a series of reworkings of Brueghel's painting, The Triumph of Death, and Eliza begins to realize that Flynn may have more complex motives for allowing his work to be shown at a small gallery in a provincial city. But she is distracted, first by the repercussions of the murder, four years before, of a friend's daughter, followed by the friend's death in a car accident just before the book opens. Then a young woman who lives in one of the flats above the gallery is found dead in the canal, while a teenage girl also goes missing in an apparently unrelated case. Events take a sinister turn at the gallery as the nightmare images from Daniel Flynn's exhibition start to spill out into the real world. Is this the work of a psychopath, or is there some link between present violence and the tragedy of four years ago?