Paul Charles brings north London alive as he describes the routines and eccentricities of Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy. Kennedy's intimate knowledge of his patch of London, Camden Town, is needed when a body is discovered at the bottom of Regent's Canal. Doctor Edmund Godfrey Berry is a young, successful doctor with a thriving career and a beautiful wife and child. Suicide seems unlikely but he seems to have no enemies. The only blotch on his otherwise sparkling career is the mysterious death of one of his former patients, a schoolteacher named Susanne Collins. Could these two things possibly be linked? Beneath the surface of comfortable respectability, lies a shocking secret that pulls all of the pieces together.

Obsessed with the quality of his beloved cups of tea, Kennedy is an orderly, civilized man who believes that crimes are best solved in well-organized, carefully though-out ways. His life, however, is turned around when he becomes involved with a sexy, vivacious journalist, ann rea. Maybe absolute order isn't all that it's cracked up to be.