Megan Harpur took the train back from London to tell her husband she was leaving him for another man. By the time Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur discovered her in the station parking lot in the early hours of the morning, there was nothing anyone could do. Who had committed this savage killing? What did Megan's lover's nervous, secret activities have to do with it? The crime confronts Harpur with the most unnerving case of his career.

Bill James's Harpur and Iles books are deliciously unsavoury: a brilliant combination of almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary manners. A stylised world that is several moves from reality, and about as real as you can get. - John Harvey, The Crime Writer's Crime Writer, Guardian There is nothing else quite like this series of police procedurals. James is concerned with the dilemmas and difficulties of policing Britain's inner cities, and he addresses these in hard-edged narratives that leave readers gasping and flinching, praying the people in these stories never come to live in their streets....It's all delivered in a ferociously poetic voice that is uniquely Bill James. - The Times [London], 100 Masters of Crime; James makes his grimmest, most acid sortie yet into the tangled domestic and working lives of his ferocious fuzz.-John Coleman, Sunday Times [London]