‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune Ivor Maddox has his hands more full than ever, with his wife Sue expecting a baby. To add to this, he also faces several of the most complex and frustrating cases of his career: the killing of a thirteen-year-old whose grief-stricken father takes the law into his own hands, and the shooting of a wealthy businessman, which sends Maddox digging into the past.Most extraordinary of all are the corpses that keep turning up under the floorboards of abandoned houses all over the country. And when the vital clue to the identity of the mass murderer turns up in Maddox’s territory, it’s up to him to solve one of the crimes of the century.