The twentieth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person.

The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while... A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father's worst nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old daughter on the side of the road.

As a man with a strained father-daughter relationship himself, Wexford must struggle to keep his professional life as a detective separate from his personal life as husband and father. Particularly when a second teenage girl is murdered - a victim unquestionably linked to the first - and another family is shattered...