Perhaps it is a blessing when Jasmine Dent dies in her sleep. At long
last an end has come to the suffering of a body horribly ravaged by
disease. It may well have been suicide; she had certainly expressed her
willingness to speed the inevitable. But small inconsistencies lead her
neighbor, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard, to a startling
conclusion: Jasmine Dent was murdered. But if not for mercy, why would
someone destroy a life already so fragile and doomed? As Kincaid and his
capable and appealing assistant Sergeant Gemma James sift through the
dead woman's strange history, a troubling puzzle begins to take shape --
a bizarre amalgam of good and evil, of charity and crime . . . and of
the blinding passions that can drive the human animal to perform cruel
and inhuman acts.