When her grandmother's ashes along with a family portrait arrive at her home in England, fourteen-year-old Tatiana finds herself being tormented by supernatural forces. To free herself from the increasingly persistent hauntings, she has to find and release the ghost of an ancestor caught up in the terror of the French Revolution. With the aid of her cousin, Marcus, she sets out on a mission, which leads them through the dramas of present-day life in Paris and the frightening upheavals of Revolutionary France.