This is an atmospheric crime novel from a prize-winning author. In 1986, on a country lane in Shropshire, a newspaper boy appears to have been abducted. Some twenty years later, Sarah Clement, a once successful novelist, disappears from her houseboat on the Grand Union Canal. Her submerged body is found a few days later by a woman working with a group of canal restoration volunteers. DI Frank Kavanagh is seconded to the case, along with his lover and colleague, DC Jane Salt. As the pair embark upon the routine round of house-to-house enquiries, computer checks and interviews with those who knew the dead woman, a number of suspects emerge. But the case is complicated further when the owner of a bed-and-breakfast close to the canal is also found dead, in mysterious and gruesome circumstances.