Publisher's Synopsis
Family and kinship in London is in a bad way. Police and politicians refer to it as the 'new front line'. Love and romance, childhood and beauty are better served by fairy stories than by a popular culture entirely geared to seduction. And what passes for a father figure these days is likely to be a child psychiatrist. Such as George Harper, liberal, humane, and very radical, whose belief is: save the child and you save society.
So when Harper is found strangled and mutilated, hoist up the mast of his own yacht in one of the gentrified harbours on the Thames, investigating officer Bob Clyne, himself a single parent with his own fears for the safety of his children, starts looking for suspects on Harper's client list of disturbed adolescents and among his sailing friends, powerful figures in the media and the law courts. Then Clyne tracks down Harper's estranged daughter, the enigmatic and erotically charged Alice, a celebrity interviewer who, with brother Max, lives like Hansel and Gretel in a traveller's camp in East London. And even though Alice is a suspect Clyne cannot help himself being drawn into a dangerous intimacy with her.
