Perhaps it is a blessing when Jasmine Dent dies in her sleep-at last an end has come to the suffering of a body horribly ravaged by disease. It may well have been suicide, she had certainly expressed her willingness to speed the inevitable. But small inconsistencies lead her neighbor, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, to a startling conclusion: Dent was murdered. But if not for mercy, why would someone destroy a life already doomed? As Kincaid and his appealing assistant Sergeant Gemma James sift through the dead woman's strange history, a troubling puzzle emerges: a bizarre amalgam of charity and crime-and of the blinding passions that can drive the human animal to perform cruel and inhuman acts.