Jo and Gemma are friends who meet for coffee every Saturday to gossip and discuss the state of the world. At one such meeting, Gemma mentions killing her boss and Jo goes along with the joke. But Jo is not amused when she finds a real body on the beach at Selsey soon afterwards - an unidentified nearly-naked woman, who has been drowned.
It take DCI Hen Mallin and her team some time to discover who the woman is, and as they are investigating, Jo and Gemma are getting into more trouble - they keep coming across dead bodies...
Peter Lovesey's thirtieth novel explores one of his favourite themes - the innocent caught up in sinister events. His previous Hen Mallin book, The Circle, was described by Gerald Kaufman in The Scotsman as 'this gem of a book ... the superb Peter Lovesey provides yet another novel of unalloyed delight.