Welcome back to the picturesque Irish town of Ballybucklebo among its cheerful inhabitants, whose joys and troubles are described with humor and love by Patrick Taylor. Again we meet Fingal O'Reilly, a quirky and sometimes harsh, but dedicated doctor, to whom patients come not only with ailments, but also with personal troubles. But now the doctor looks back to his younger days, when he wanted to marry the lovely midwife Deirdre Mawhinney as a fresh medical graduate. His plans were then thwarted by the war, he enlisted as a military doctor on a battlecruiser and Deirdre...
Memories of the time when he was responsible for the health of twelve hundred ship crew members and treated many wounded, have fortunately faded and are no longer relevant to life in the town. But the doctor and his younger colleague still have to deal with challenging tasks - to stop an epidemic of rubella or suppress the occurrence of a strange tropical disease. And then there are problems that definitely do not fall into medicine, for example the irreconcilable fight of the participants in the competition for the best homemade fruit pie or the dispute between father and son, in which the son's future is at stake. Empathic and wise, O'Reilly may have a recipe for every pain and trouble - until a secret from his stormy past emerges.