When Carl Foster embarks on a quiet weekend away with his family its an all-too-infrequent opportunity to leave the consuming nature of his work behind him and spend some quality time with the ones he is supposed to love. But what begins as a pleasant, if somewhat conversationally strained, journey to a remote guesthouse in the Northumberland countryside, ends in an ordeal of terror as Carl is forced off the road, in a flurry of verbal abuse, by a travelling convoy of gypsies. In a moment of clouded stupidity Carl allows tiredness and anger to manifest in a defiance that will ultimately leave his car wrecked, and his family all but dead. When he finally regains consciousness Carl discovers that both he and his family have been bound, gagged, and stripped in an abandoned diner, by those same terrifying travellers with whom he had clashed only hours before. A journey of relaxation has become a quest to survive. Carl struggles to find a way to free his family from imprisonment and escape the attentions of people who are clearly seeking to humiliate, torture, rape, and, as Carl assumes, murder their captives. But things are never quite as simple as Carl believes, and escape from his ordeal is much more than just a question of choice and the consequences that follow.