A city has to give up one of its secrets for a detective to catch a killer.
Liverpool is in the midst of an emergency. Several people have been poisoned. But DI Tara Grogan is not on the case. Instead, she has an in-tray full of mundane tasks and jealously watches from the sidelines as the high profile investigation unfolds.
One such task is looking into the suicide of a company executive. Probing a little deeper, Grogan begins to smell a rat. All is not well at Harbinson Fine Foods and, with the city on high alert and its people on edge, the detective begins to suspect a connection to the main investigation.
Struggling to convince her superiors of her lead, Grogan strikes up a friendship with the deceased's lover and company secretary, the seductive Jez Riordan.
Once again, only by overstepping the boundaries between work and pleasure, can Grogan begin to see the whole picture. With more murders inevitable and the main investigation stalled, the detective enters the ring, and must parry the moves of powerful and motivated people to nail the suspect.
A covert cop becomes a target when she picks the wrong cover story.
The Treadwater Estate has become the epicenter of a series of strange events. People go missing. Bodies are found-buried and wrapped in clingfilm. Yet there appears to be no connection between the victims and no motive for the crimes.
The estate looks anonymous, its residents inscrutable. Door-to-door inquiries fall flat. No one has seen anything, everyone resents the police presence. Someone must be hiding in plain sight.
Faced with a wall of silence, to dig deeper DI Tara Grogan must get closer to the action than is safe. Not being from the area, a local choir provides her with an entry point. But will the very guise that she adopts to be accepted into the community, that of a reformed con, be her undoing?
If her cover is blown, her life is in danger. But if she doesn't push her luck to the limits, a killer will get away with it.
A spell-binding mystery, packed with suspense . . .
During the investigation into the death of a woman on a Liverpool housing estate, DI Tara Grogan encounters Callum, a local recluse who claims to have information.
But he won't help her unless she, in turn, helps him find out the truth about the suspicious death of his wife and child.
Tara is ready to dismiss his outlandish theories and ravings, until she discovers that, like her, he was a student at Latimer College, Oxford. A place which she has very much buried in the past.
Desperate to move forward in her case and curiosity piqued, Tara accepts, but as she delves deeper into the man's past, it becomes obvious he hasn't been honest with her.
And when another death is linked to Callum, Tara is confronted by the danger that her own demons have led her to trust the wrong person again.
