Anastasia Josephs was murdered at the age of eight for what she may have witnessed, and that triple lighthouse killing still haunts the isolated Northern California town of Pt. Dolores. The arrival of Ruth M, the FBI textile forensics consultant known within the department as the Yarn Woman, is bound to dredge up the ghosts of the past. Ruth awakens the first night of a well-earned vacation at the Point Dolores lighthouse lodge and finds Ana at her bedside. The child is bright and inquisitive, and the seed of a deep friendship is planted. Ana asks for Ruth’s silk pajama top, and in exchange Ruth finds herself with a pair of stockings impossibly knit from sea silk, the rare marine thread known to ancient Chinese as “cloth from west of the sea.” But soon Ruth learns that Ana, her father, and a well-loved sheriff’s deputy, were murdered nearly twenty years before. As Ruth works her way toward the cold-case killer she challenges what we think we know about life and death and the mystical, liminal world between … where lost souls wander.