When Detective Inspector Lesley Gunn married Sir Nicholas Torrance, she might have expected this to be the end of her career as a sleuth. But returning from their honeymoon, they find themselves involved with the flamboyant Chet Brunner. The brash film and TV entrepreneur Brunner has surrounded himself with enemies, along with an ex-wife lurking in a nearby cottage with her criminal second husband. Added to that Brunner's current wife and latest mistress are battling over him and with him. And the young widow who runs self-catering cottages nearby has some startling things to learn about her dead husband and the bumptious Brunner. When a killer strikes, Lesley cannot help offering her, own theories, which do not go down well with the woman DCI in charge of the investigation. While Nick wants to stay uninvolved, the two of them are drawn once more into a mesh of mayhem and murder. And once more John Burke, of whom a reviewer has said 'he never writes the same story twice', provides a tantalizing tale for readers eager to follow the further adventures of 'the Laird and the Law'.