Elena Weaver shocked anyone who met her for the first time. In her skimpy dresses and bright jewellery, she exuded intelligence and sexuality. While her mother fretted about her welfare at home in London, in Cambridge - where Elena was a student at St Stephen's College - her father had a very different image of the girl. As for Elena, she lived a life of casual but intense physical and emotional relationships, with scores to settle and goals to achieve - until someone, lying in wait along the route she ran every morning, bludgeoned her to death.
When Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers enter the rarefied world of Cambridge University, they find themselves unravelling a tangled skein of love, obsession and desire - a maelstrom of emotion upon whose altar Elena Weaver has been sacrificed.
