A beautiful blonde woman meets her lover, a Chinese man called Michael Chan, in a room in the Four Season’s Hotel in San Francisco.
In the next room a man and a woman use hi-tech devices to record everything the couple does and says.
Minutes later the man, the surveillance couple and a maid down the hall are all dead.
Up to the point when the woman enters the hotel room everything is caught on closed circuit TV.
Then, thanks to a digital blackout, it all goes blank.
When Detective Lindsay Boxer and partner Detective Richie Conklin are handed the case they find no sign that the ardent femme fatale was ever at the crime scene.
Nor where she has disappeared to.
Boxer and Ritchie’s first stop is Chan’s wife but she is not much help.
The downing of an aircraft which kills everyone on board and results in the detectives being pulled off the homicides to help with the mess, adds to the puzzle when the name Michael Chan appears on the list of those killed in the crash.
Then the second Chan’s body disappears from the morgue Mrs Chan is shot, execution style, in her home.
CCTV footage from the hotel and surveillance tapes from outside Mrs Chan’s house both show a man who strongly resembles Boxer’s husband, Joe.
The investigation suddenly becomes very personal for our intrepid heroine.
When Joe disappears for more than a week without contacting her, Boxer is convinced he is directly involved in the case and might also have known about the aircraft crash long enough before it happened to have prevented it.
Then the CIA becomes involved and it looks as if the murders and the plane crash have been orchestrated by them.
When the CIA asks her to back off an investigation over which they have no jurisdiction, Boxer redoubles her efforts.
This fast-paced, skillfully written 15th in the Women’s Murder Club (WMC) series is perhaps the best so far, although there is less WMC and more Lindsay Boxer than in previous books.
Indeed, except for very little help from two of the other members, Lindsay goes it alone.
Dare we suggest, though, that Patterson and Paetro may have written themselves into a corner because, while the book is eminently readable, the ending is a little sudden and somewhat scrappy?
