Cambridge is sweltering during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet--"lost" on the left, "found" on the right--and the two never seem to balance. Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge and has a failed marriage to prove it.

Surrounded by death, intrigue, and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected...