Bücher der Reihe Charmian Daniels

Two people come drifting into the prosperous and growing town of Deerham Hills, forty miles from London. One, already dead and in the river, is an unidentified woman: the other, also faceless, is a hater of women and a murderer. 'It's a classic,' says Sergeant Charmian Daniels of the Deerham Hills Police about this eerie and terrifying case: a case which builds up a momentum that all but engulfs Charmian herself and her career.

Sergeant Charmian Daniels of the Deerham Hills police force was at Midport University on a three-fold mission-to lecture to local police cadets, to keep an eye on student trouble-makers and to start a diploma in criminology. The subject of her thesis was already forming in her mind-the new kind of killer. The population was growing younger all the time; given a decade or two, statistics would show that one man in three would have a violent act in his past. Society was creating a new kind of killer, casual, committing murder almost without thought. And in the world of the future, Charmian knew that woman stood a better than average chance of being victims. What she didn't know was that even as she thought about the new pattern in crime, the ominous statistics for it were already being proven on dangerously close ground.

Charmian was right that disporder was on its way to Deerham Hills. The first instalment had arrived in the form of one dead man, unknown, probably murdered: and a robbery at a local furrier's which was Charmian's immediate business.Was the strange woman who had recently come to town the catalyst which produced the violence? Or was she just a symptom of it? An eruption on the face of a patient who already has the plague? Charmian did not know. Not at first.There was nothing strange about a Woman Police Officer getting on with her job, but this was the first time it was a woman against a woman . . .