Death at a Distance — Brian W. Strutt

When a murder is committed sex or money, or both is seldomly not involved. Fresh from solving the bizarre murders of three pregnant women Detective Inspector Siobhan Burrows and Detective Segeant Amy Rhodes of the St Albans Police force find that both motives are present in their next case. Charles Roberts, brother-in-law of Cynthia Roberts, one of the recently murdered pregnant women, is shot outside the Jackdaw Pub. Why anyone should seek the death of an apparantly inoffensive salesman of truffles and live escargot, who is based in France, is a mystery which deepens when Amy, paired with SOCO Chief Sean O'Driscoll, follows the trail and discover an inordinately large amunt of money in the victim's French bank account. Sean and Amy also discover an attraction between themselves which leads them into a passionate affair. This is completely at odds with the sadistic streak shown by Amy when she 'interviews' an agent from MI6 who, she believes, holds some clues as to the motives behind the murder. Meanwhile, in England, siobhan Burrows, working with computer whiz, Detective Constable Roger Paulson and under the supervision of Detective Chief Inspector St John (pronounced Sinjun) Harcourt is following a line of enquiry closer to her home patch of St Albans. It seems to be leading nowhere until a second man is murdered and three police officers, left to guard his empty house and the secrets it may contain, are brutally shot. Harcourt suspects that forces more secret and outside the purview of the police force are in play and, while love and sex break out between his subordinates, he ponders: Is he right? Enquiries take the team into the fringe world of espionage and arbitrage, a high powered system of wheeler dealing using hundreds of millions of borrowed funds to fince what could be illicit major products around the world. To protect their schemes, those involved consider murder as relatively unimportant. St John and his team do not and dradually they home in on the man who, almost almost beyond belief, is behind it all.