Poor Ted Gray: Nothing ever seems to go his way, from an unhappy childhood to a loveless marriage to a lackluster career. His luck doesn't improve when he stumbles across the brutally strangled body of a local schoolgirl. Now Ted is a murder suspect, and Charmian Daniels must get to the bottom of a case that grows stranger with every clue?and seems to implicate a surprising number of people. What haunts young Pix, a schoolboy who saw too much? What possesses Una Gray, the missing suspect's sad little wife? What drives the headmaster to desperate measures to save his school? And how much does Charmian's friend Mary, a beautiful socialite with a nose for gossip, really know? The answers are as elusive as they are shocking in this riveting, compelling mystery by one of the genre's most accomplished writers.