The second novel featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James

Perhaps it is a blessing when Jasmine Dent dies in her sleep.

At long last an end has come to the suffering of a body horribly ravaged by disease.

It may well have been suicide; she had certainly expressed her willingness to speed the inevitable. But small inconsistencies lead her neighbour, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard, to a startling conclusion: Jasmine Dent was murdered.

But if not for mercy, why would someone destroy a life already so fragile and doomed?

As Kincaid and his capable partner Sergeant Gemma James sift through the dead woman's strange history, from her childhood in India to the final months of her illness, they discover a hauntingly beautiful young woman, secretive and ambitious. A troubling puzzle begins to take shape - a bizarre amalgam of good and evil, of charity and crime... and of the blinding passions that can drive the human animal to perform cruel and inhuman acts.

*Written with compassion, clarity, wit and precision, this graceful mystery amply fulfils the promise of Crombie's debut novel' Publishers Weekly