Another authentic spine-tingling thriller from the woman who has been there herself. When Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, she finds a neighbour convinced that the young woman has been assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to co-operate with Alex and the police investigators. After another woman is found murdered in the same apartment, with an extremely valuable book at her side, Alex is drawn into the strange and privileged world of rich and secretive book collectors, where avarice and greed is as strong an inheritance as wealth.