When the daughter of a retired police officer and a male friend are found beaten to death, Lynley brings in the recently demoted Havers to help.

Havers is reinstated as DS and immediately volunteers to go undercover in a case involving a murder made to look like suicide.

Lynley investigates the car bomb murder of a womanizing forensic pathologist whose list of former lovers includes Helen. Fraught and angry, lynley struggles to hold himself together with mixed emotions tussling conversely with his seemingly impeccable professional etiquette as an upstanding police officer