A care assistant, Fiona Tidy, has gone missing and DCI Michael Janaway sets out to find her, encouraged by one of her service users, a young autistic man called Stewie. Janaway, who has autistic traits himself, is working against time, since two women have already been murdered recently in his home city of Cambridge, and the more he looks into Fiona’s disappearance, the likelier, it seems, the outcome will be tragic. Fiona has written in adoring terms about her therapist, the mysterious ‘B’, in her diary, and it turns out, on further investigation, that this is not the first woman the therapist has known who has gone missing…

So far, so simple. But where is B? And how long before there is more bad news? Janaway, who is at a crossroads in his personal life, has to deal with his own turbulent feelings in uncovering a mystery that explores the foolhardiness of obsessive love, the usefulness or otherwise of psychoanalysis, and the perils of dating online.