"We may still be in the gentle folds of the Yorkshire countryside, but the view doesn't look so pretty anymore."--New York Times Book Review

In the long shadows of an alley a young man is murdered by an unknown assailant. The shattering echoes of his death will be felt throughout a small provincial community on the edge--because the victim, a youth whose sordid secret life was a tangle of bewildering contradictions, was far from innocent. Now a dedicated policeman beset by his own tormenting demons must follow the leads into the darkest corners of the human mind in order to catch a killer.