These murders aren't really so bad. They tend to happen offstage, around the corner or just over the hill. The victims are all some sort of pond scum; their deaths are seen as steps in the right direction. And regularly the dead crooks are killed by live ones, albeit with the approval and occasional encouragement of the police officers closest to the action, especially ACC Desmond Iles and DCS Colin Harpur.
Iles, the assistant chief constable of James's fictional city's force, is ruthless, egotistical, brilliant, and marginally insane. Under (or perhaps because of) Chief Mark Lane's ineffectual leadership, he has been able to orchestrate a peace of sorts among the various drug barons.
The chief is being promoted to somewhere else, out of town, however, and his replacement may destroy the fragile ecology Iles has promoted for so many volumes. The ACC is further distracted by Fay-Alice Rideout, the 18-year-old daughter of his lately run-over grass, who is off to Oxford on a police scholarship for children of grasses. Fay-Alice is the girl with the long back, and Iles is quite taken with her: ''The ACC loved to get among teenage schoolgirls if they looked clean and were wearing light summery clothes."
Holding things together in this book -- as in all the others -- is Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur, the real hero of the series. The only person who can keep pace with Iles, he must constantly oil the waters his superior has roiled. He disapproves of ''pacts with villains. Lawlessness was then normality." Without Iles's knowledge he places Louise Machin, a young detective, undercover inside Dubal's drug-pushing organization, and does his best to keep her alive thereafter. With her help and that of favorite grass Lamb, he somehow manages to find out nearly everything, almost in the nick of time.
