Jeremy Ransom is a Chicago homicide detective who fancies himself a modern-day Holmes. His unofficial Watson is Emily Charters, whom he met in the first series entry, Presence of Mind. Emily gently prods Ransom here and there for the information she needs to solve the case, or at least put it in a context Ransom can live with. In this venture, Angela Stephens, a wealthy Gold Coast resident, approaches Ransom and coolly tells him that her death was foretold by a tarot card reader and the she believes the reader. Ransom, ever the intellectual, doesn't accept her tale, but neither does he reject it. When she's found strangled the next day by her estranged husband, Ransom has a real puzzle to solve. The husband is the obvious suspect, but Ransom isn't obvious. As he plunges deeply into the backgrounds of the principals, he unearths enough greed and family revenge to keep Emily quoting Hamlet throughout. Although set in modern Chicago, the Ransom/Charters novels have a very British ambience

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