This book was the Edgar Award finalist for best book! Meet Sergeant Merci Rayborn of the Orange County (California) sheriff's office. She's honest, courageous, clever, determined, quietly desperate, and unforgettable. Introduced by Parker in 1998's The Blue Hour, she is still, two years later, destabilized by what happened to her back then: Her lover was murdered, and in a bloody battle, she gunned down the sociopath who killed him. At work now, she functions with her customary efficiency, but her heart is in deep-freeze, her emotional life comatose. When an exotic young call girl becomes a homicide victim, Merci catches the case. Almost from the first, it's disturbingly clear that the leading suspect will turn out to be a cop. Not just any cop, but Mike McNally, the one Merci's involved with, the one her inner woman has been counting on to wake Sleeping Beauty. The evidence accumulates, and no matter how she squirms to dodge the implications, Merci's investigation keeps pointing to Mikeand then, suddenly, not just to him but to other colleagues she respects and trusts, and finally to an ex-cop she loves: her father. Clinging to her sense of what matters most, Merci finally cracks her case, only to be confronted with choices painful enough to make her wish she hadn't. An admirably constructed police procedural that's also an unsparing examination of a gallant woman's search for a moral code worth the commitment.