The Institution

On a locked ward at The Institution — the highest-security prison hospital for the criminally insane — a nurse has been murdered and her newborn taken. A ransom has been demanded and the clock is running.

Forensic profiler Dr Connie Woolwine goes in as a member of staff. Her cover gives her days, not weeks, and access to the men most likely to have done it, several of whom are as interested in her as she is in them. The staff are no less opaque than the patients, and Connie's own methods depend on reading people who have spent their lives learning to be misread.

The second Connie Woolwine novel, following The Shadow Man. Helen Fields writes claustrophobic institutional crime — the horror comes from the building's rules as much as from the people inside it.