November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied,rubbish piles in the streets - and in West London a black woman known as 'Mad Annie' dies in a rain-soaked gutter.

Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason - that she was murdered. For something passed between Annie and Mrs Ranelagh at the moment of death.

But why is Mrs Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? And why does she spend the next twenty years painstakingly trying to uncover the truth . . . ?

"She lay with her head cradled in her arms, her knees drawn up tight against her chin... Did she think I wouldn"t come back? Is that what persuaded her to uncradle her poor head and life her pain-filled eyes to mine? I have no idea if that was the moment she died-the said afterwards it probably was..."

"Probably the most unsettling and complex in the whole, extraordinary Waiters canon... The drama stays taut until the last page, which may,by the way, make you weep."--Frances Fyfield,Sunday Espress

"Breaking all the rules of popular fiction, Waiters asks as much of her readers as many literary novelists, and yet she offers them a book as gripping as any thriller."--Natasha Cooper,Times Literary Supplement.