Widowed sci-fi writer, Simon Carswell, burdened by guilt from the past, can't understand why his brilliant granddaughter has taken against him. His son attributes the girl's antagonism to her mother going off with her latest lover. Yet, when a neighbour's body turns up in the writer's garden, is this linked to the man's guilt or to the voices that emerged from his computer... voices inspiring his latest novel about an alien takeover of Earth via the internet. A tale of murder, family love and child abuse as seen through the eyes of a grandfather, a father, and a young girl. All is not what it appears to be to the authorities.