The 27th installment in the popular Harpur & Iles series.

A woman and her stepson are gunned down while driving to school on a quiet residential street. An former bodyguard kills himself by firing two pistols simultaneously. Was the killer really aft er the woman’s husband, the notorious drug baron Mansel Shale? And what possible connection could Shale’s collection of pre-Raphaelite works of art have to the killings? Nothing in Bill James’s latest Harpur & Iles thriller is as it seems. When the police chase the shooting suspect into a busy second-hand shop the action quickly turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse standoff . As the siege unfolds, with more than just gunplay in the mix, events threaten to take down more than the gunman and his hostages. Will this spell the end of Detective Harpur and his troubled boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles?

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Bill James has been called 'the Elmore Leonard of Britain’s underworld’ (Kirkus Reviews) and has been named a 'Master of Crime’ in a mystery roundup by the London Sunday Times, which said, 'There is nothing else quite like this series of police procedurals. James is concerned with the dilemmas and difficulties of policing Britain’s inner cities, and he addresses these in hard-edged narratives that leave readers gasping and flinching, praying the people in these stories never come to live in their streets.’ In addition to the Harpur and Iles series, James is the author of other mystery series and a book on Anthony Powell. He lives in Wales.