The second stunning literary crime novel in the Song Cycle trilogy from the acclaimed author of Booker-longlisted Peacetime, and The Book of the Heathen .In this second book in the acclaimed trilogy that began with Cradle Song, Private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by the mother of a girl who disappeared a year earlier in violent and mysterious circumstances. Investigating both the background to this disappearance, and the man held to be responsible, Rivers is drawn through a long, hot summer into a world of human-trafficking and governmental corruption at every turn, each unraveled piece of the mystery moving him further from the vanished girl and deeper into a web of exploitation, greed, temptation, revenge and violence from which even he is eventually unable to extricate himself without unforeseen and tragic consequences.