Five people on a hot summer evening train to Bath: a stout matron, a kilted Scot and his fiancee, a scantily-clad publicist and a drowsy book-reading bachelor.
Before the weekend is done, one of them will be dead, killed without motive and without reason. Radiating out from the murder is a web of deception, high-class prostitution, vanity, adultery, ambition and death.
Stepping carefully from one lie to another comes Detective Inspector James Boswell Hodge Leonard and his sergeant, the intriguing Madelaine Jack. To Leonard, this is much more than a murder case. For he was the fifth person on that train...