Devices and Desires

Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has just brought out a new book of poems and wants a few quiet days away from the publicity. He retreats to Larksoken, a remote headland on the Norfolk coast, where his late aunt left him a converted windmill.

The quiet does not last. A psychotic strangler of young women is loose in Norfolk, and with each new killing he works his way closer to the headland. Then Dalgliesh himself comes upon a body on the beach: the Acting Administrative Officer has been murdered.

The dead man's death draws Dalgliesh into the small community that lives on the headland, a place of passions, ambitions and secrets that people have kept hidden. The case turns out to be one of the most baffling of his career, and it is unclear whether the strangler has anything to do with it.

This is a detective novel in the classic mould, with a lonely coastal setting and a cast of flawed, fallible people tangled in each other's schemes. It features Dalgliesh as the investigating detective and unfolds as a murder mystery that builds slowly and keeps a wary, brooding mood.