The drag queen named Vera Reynolds swayed on-stage singing "Falling in Love Again." And a sixteen-year-old boy lay in Vera's fire-engulfed apartment...very, very dead. He was a "rent boy," a sex-for-hire street kid who catered to the tastes of special customers. It was the kind of murder Soho's Vice Squad saw often. But the influential do-gooder who was a prime suspect in this one made the young boy's death different-a ticking bomb able to blast open the nasty, secret lives of politicians, judges...and cops. Detective Jane Tennison had moved up the career ladder through sheer guts and an unstoppable passion for justice. Now, on her first day as the head of the Vice Squad, she caught a case threatening to wreck her career. She had been told whom to arrest-and whom to back off from-in the murder of the "rent boy." And she couldn't go with the program. She knew a destroyer of children was out there. She knew she had a choice: to save her future or go after him like an avenging angel, and damn the consequences to hell...