When the body of a fourteen-year-old teenager is found in the margin of a lake in Paradise, Massachusetts, the Chief of Police Jesse Stone and his officer Simpson seek clues in the spot. Through a class ring of a student that they find near the corpse, they identity the dead girl, the local slut Billy Bishop. Meanwhile, his department deals with a domestic violent situation with an aggressive and abusive husband who beats his wife. Along his investigation, Stone discloses that the famous writer...

Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir and declines a job in Robert's firm. When Robert's mother passes away, he begins to reconsider things and his and...