Description

When Alison Mannings' teenage daughter finds the family dogs hanging by the neck from the apple tree in her garden, Alison knows instinctively that Kevin Todd has killed them. But she doesn't know why. Nor, she comes to realize, does she really know much about Kevin. Yet he had been her lover until a few days previously. And then abruptly he left, without explanation. But all Alison wants to know is why he killed the dogs. She enlists the help of local private detective Frank Hargreaves. Frank is usually diffident and aloof, more concerned about his racehorse and his own teenage daughter than about his often wayward clients. Now he finds himself drawn into these fractured lives. Frank makes his way into the grey land of the past. Facts begin to replace the fictions that Kevin Todd has spun like cobwebs around himself; and Alison disintegrates, as her own illusions begin to unravel. Like a frantic terrier, Frank carries on digging for the truth, regardless of the consequences. Finally Frank reaches the dark heart of Kevin's past, and discovers secrets so grotesque and so tightly woven into the fabric of time that they threaten to disturb the lives of all who are touched by them.