Juliet Kipper, a gifted painter, is strangled in the LA gallery where her first solo show has opened to critical acclaim, and Milo Sturgis takes on the murder investigation as a favour to an old friend. He consults Alex Delaware, who, researching parallels with other deaths, looks for artists killed when on the verge of a breakthrough or comeback. And he finds two others. A few weeks earlier, blues player Edgar Michael 'Baby Boy' Lee was stabbed just after finishing his set at The Snakepit.
Alex Delaware's relationship with his longterm partner is on the rocks. He is floored when Robin announces she's heading off on a three-month music tour. But he soon has other things to think about. He is sent an envelope with no return address. Inside, he finds an album with gold letters on it - THE MURDER BOOK. It's full of macabre pictures of murders, with brief descriptions of how, and why, the victims died. One picture is marked 'Not solved' - the horrifically mutilated body of a young woman. Unsettled, Alex calls his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, who seems strangely familiar with the case. What connects the photograph with Milo's past?
People are voluntarily dying before their time in California. Some call it assisted suicide when cancer or heart disease or painful old age make the quality of life unbearable. Others say it is murder, that no-one has the right to help others take their own life.
Two murder victims have been discovered in the boots of their cars. The first was would-be actor, Richard Dada; the second Dr Claire Argent, a psychiatrist at a maximum security hospital. Milo Sturgis tends to think there will be plenty of suspects amongst her clientele, but as his friend Alex Delaware remarks, none of his patients ever killed anyone and as they investigate the backgrounds of both victims it appears that Milo needs to look elsewhere, because neither of them are who they made themselves out to be.
