An attractive and highly intelligent police detective, Christine Boland, forms the brilliant centerpiece of William D. Pease's explosive novel of psychological suspense. Detective Boland is assigned to investigate the death of socialite Marian Avery, whose body is found in her grand house in fashionable southern Maryland. Beside her sits the Averys' ten-year-old son, Ned, huddled in a silent, shock-induced world of his own that no one is able to penetrate. The murder confounds Boland and her fellow detectives. The evidence of burglary seems only to be a cover-up to confuse the police. Why, Christine wonders, would anyone want to kill Marian Avery?Soon Marian's husband, Cooper Avery, son of a former Maryland congressman, becomes the chief suspect when he gives the police a false story of his whereabouts at the time of the murder. Almost without trying, the police also uncover a motive: money. The police learn that Avery, the president of his wife's family's multimillion-dollar business, Thurston Construction, was having an affair. His lover was a woman executive at the company trying to take over Thurston. Marian's father, Ed Thurston, was fighting the takeover but Avery would make tens of millions if it happened. Avery controls Marian's shares but her father has been urging her to get them back. But if Marian were dead... The evidence mounts and Avery is indicted.All of Christine's colleagues believe that Avery is the killer, but Christine thinks they are just eager to solve a high-profile case. Certain that they are wrong, and powerless to stop the case from going forward, Christine steps over the line, and when she does she finds her own life and her passionate affair with the sculptor Alex Trigorin being drawn into the vortex. Working alone and against time, Detective Boland painstakingly uncovers long-buried Avery family secrets, finding clues from other times and other places, from the red-baiting of the McCarthy era to the tragic life of a small child growing up in Strasbourg, France.The novel's finale, the trial of Cooper Avery with its compelling and authentic courtroom scenes and the unpredictable revelations that follow, is certain to hold you in its spellbinding power.William D. Pease, whose first novel, Playing the Dozens, had Nelson DeMille comparing him to "Dashiell Hammett at his best," continues brilliantly in the footsteps of Hammett in this intricate and irresistible second novel. Read Less