Nighthawk

lone German bomber crosses the East coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge's rail yards. The shell falls short of its mark, and lands in a maze-like neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the city's medieval centre. D I Eden Brooke is first on the scene and discovers the body of an elderly woman, Nora Wylde, beside her shattered bed in a terrace house on Elm Street, two fingers on her left hand severed, in what looks like a brutal attempt by looters to steal her rings. When the next day Nora's teenage granddaughter, Peggy, a munitions worker at Marshall's Airfield, is reported missing, Brooke realises there is more to the situation that meets the eye.

Spring 1941. It is the third year of war, and when the siren sounds the people of Cambridge trudge to the city's public bomb shelters. Crowded, smoky, often raucous, the shelters have become a way of life for the poor. At dawn the body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner of the Trinity Shelter, one of three on the city's great open space - Parker's Piece. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke searches the body and finds no wallet or papers, save for a cinema ticket dated six months earlier. PC Vanessa Hill - a recruit to The Borough police from Girton College - uses her skills in fine art to sketch the dead man's face for a poster. An autopsy reveals the only clue to his death is the wound left by a hypodermic needle in the back of his neck. Brooke has a very puzzling case on his hands.