The second book in the Dalziel and Pascoe series sends the two mismatched Yorkshire policemen among university students, a group for which Andy Dalziel has no great love. In fact, when he hears a dead body has been found on the grounds of Holm Coultram College, he thinks of it as rather a good start. This is 1971, and the police force does not enjoy the warmest of relations with the Ivory Tower. Nevertheless, Dalziel takes himself to college, where the single corpse is followed by another and then another, until even Dalziel is forced to admit that someone is going after the academic community with rather excessive zeal.

'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' Marcel Berlins, The Times '[Reginald Hill] keeps one on the edge of one's wits throughout a bitterly enthralling detection thriller' Sunday Times When a four-year-old child is abducted from an Essex kindergarten, Detective Inspector Dog Cicero soon realizes that this is no routine investigation. Something about the child's mother troubles him. Maybe it's the fact that she comes from Derry, and Cicero's Northern Ireland scars go deeper than his ruined face. But he can't help feeling there's more to it than that. Soon Cicero finds the odds are stacked against him both personally and professionally – not that he will let that stop him. For he's a gambling man, and when death's the only game in town, a gambling man has got to play.