Dominic Devine

Charged with two murders, six years apart, and with no defence worthy of the name, a guilty verdict against solicitor John Prescott seems inevitable. The history presented by the prosecuting counsel goes back five years into the past: to fateful meetings with the women in Prescott's life, Norah Browne and Harriet Reece; to the rupturing of friendships and relationships in a small town shattered by violent death. Prescott is powerless, apathetic even, when confronted by the overwhelming evidence. And yet someone else, one of the witnesses, must have been the killer. But which one?

There are many showier if few better practitioners of the modern-traditional mystery story and this one, one of the author's best, deals with the murders of three young girls, all an unlucky 13, while a doctor with a record of personal instability and compulsive sexual needs falls, or was assisted, to his death. Mr. Devine's ending which is really the beginning could possibly once again be faulted but you would have to look hard to find more plausible and differentiated characters that live before they die. Kirkus review