Love and death are the only two sensational things that had ever happened to Margaret Parsons. The police knew all about her life and, by the look of it, it was very dull. Margaret Parsons had been a "good" woman--religious, old-fashioned, and respectable. But it was not her life that interested Chief Inspector Wexford, it was her death--passionate, violent, and unfathomable.

"A female Vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham Vicarage. The gossipy cleaning woman who discovers her body, Maxine, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. When detective inspector Mike Burden calls him, Wexford, intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. A single-mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was a woman...