Elisabeth Kennedy is a complicated, prickly ex-police detective recovering from a brutal attack of deadly acid - and a woman who is determined to fight back. Unable to escape the memory of her sister's murder, Elisabeth flees the stiflingly safe confines of her mother's seaside home to return to her own precarious existence in an apartment high atop a crumbling London bell tower. In her self-imposed exile, she assumes she will be safe, anonymous. But even the most cloistered places are not sacrosanct - especially the human heart. As she tracks her quarry through a London peopled by the pathetic and the poisonous, Elizabeth is headed for something far more chilling than loneliness, more savage than self-doubt