"We're all racist in this country" said Wexford. "Without exception. People over 40 are the worst and that's about all you can say." But until he became involved with the Akandes, whose daughter had gone missing, Wexford hadn't applied that reality to himself. Melanie Akande was black, one of only eighteen black people living in Kingsmarkham, and her father Raymond was Wexford's doctor. So he had a personal interest in the case. But as the case developed, Wexford discovered things hidden inside himself that he didn't like, found his own, unthinking attitudes prejudicing the case….

Sent to London for a rest by his doctor, Wexford can’t resist getting involved in the investigation of a mysterious murder. Read by TV’s Chief Inspector Wexford.

Wexford had every reason to remember the Painter case - it was the first murder he'd ever handled on his own. There had been no doubts about the case, until now. Someone wants the case reopened, and they want Wexford proved wrong.

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. In prison, inevitably, he reflected on the grotesque way it had begun, about the panics and violent anger. He asked himself, too, why the child of happily married, middle-class parents should have needed to make motiveless and unreasoning attacks on women. Holed up in that house with the girl, he had not meant to pull the trigger. It was panic.

Eve and Liza, Mother and Daughter, live a quiet life in their remote home; a rustic gatehouse of a country mansion. At first glance their lives appear quite ordinary, except that Liza has almost no knowledge of the outside world, has never played with a child her own age and has witnessed her mother commit murder, on multiple occasions.