Welcome to St. Rose, Cornwall, where the merry villagers make their living by wrecking ships and stealing their cargoes, where weddings are interrupted to loot shipwrecked schooners, where the parson is in the wrecker's pay and preaches a wrecker's gospel and Christmas is celebrated with fist fights and pistol shots. Meet Hannah Pendarves, first daughter of the village, who thinks anyone from as far away as the next town is a foreigner and not to be trusted. But Hannah's small world cracks open when she discovers that her father is part of a vast syndicate of wreckers and smugglers. When the syndicate places Hannah as a spy in the house of Francis Keverne, a kindly and upright Falmouth shipping agent, Hannah begins to question the wrecker's gospel and regret the blood that is on her hands. Now the wrecker's daughter must choose between her father and Francis while with every step she feels the devil, and the syndicate, snapping at her heels.