DI Treloar is Cornish and he is here to find out who committed a series of increasngly bizarre murders, in a story garnished with the reflections a female with an unusual past. Who is she? Why the French connection? Chief constable's golden boy, boss's difficult but obliging maverick, colleagues' cute Cornish cop, Treloar is grippingly introduced. A rewarding new DI on the crime mystery block; the Cornish setting, perfect. A lawyer's body is found on the beach in the small Cornish village of Porthaven, staked out with a tarred bag over its head, just as the peak summer season gets underway. When a second body is found bizarrely fixed to the floor of a building not long afterwards, the laconic police surgeon remarks 'Well, psychopaths need holidays too'; and DI Treloar, a maverick to some bosses but a driven, committed investigator to his fellow offficers, takes charge. When more bodies turn up, Treloar and his team are at first unsure - accident or murder? There seems to be no connection between the victims whose murders are violent, with escalating viciousness. What is going on? Could they have brought their fates with them, festering secrets from the past? Could either of the two mysterious men staying at the camp site be involved? Is it one or more doing the killing? What about the rabble of students in the big house or the local recluse and his enigmatic brother? What about embittered locals resentful of incomers buying up their village? And who is the extraordinary female, obsessed with birds, institutionalised in the South of France as a child, who reflects on her past as the story unfolds? Then a brutal attack on one of their own shocks Treloar's team and their focus switches in an unexpected direction when a heartfelt injustice surfaces.