"I wish I could say that the first time I met Rory Brand I knew he was a dead man walking. But I can't..." Private Investigator Sam Dyke is called in by Rory Brand to find out what's happening to his business. He knows that someone is trying to steal it from him. He thinks it's someone close to him. Very close. Sam won't get involved because no crime has been committed. But that changes when Brand is found dead in his office, with a taunting clue left on his computer screen. Now Sam is determined to find out who killed Brand, and makes a discovery that takes him back twenty years into his own past. And into a secret that had been kept from him by the prime suspect for Brand's murder ... In the first of a series of books featuring Sam Dyke, Altered Life transplants the attitude and pace of the American private eye story into a contemporary English setting.