The Glendale Police Department are as busy as usual; crime, unlike the weather, is not seasonal. Detective Delia Riordan has moved into a new apartment with her parrot Harry after her father's death, but her colleagues feel it is time she found a new man.

She won't have much time for romance, though, with a killer on the run who shot an LAPD cop and is heading for Glendale, and a crazed AWOL soldier who has also arrived with the announced intention of killing a girlfriend who has now married someone else.

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune