Moon music

Las Vegas. The Gomorrah of twentieth-century America. Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe, has been assigned to a crime shocking even in a town known for its excesses; the murder of a young showgirl whose horrifically mauled body, Poe realises, has echoes of a thirty-year-old unsolved case. But the anxieties of the present quickly overshadow the half-forgotten past, for Poe discovers that his partner on the case, Steve Jensen, had a clandestine relationship with the murdered woman. And Poe’s own relationship with Jensen’s wife, Alison, is far from straightforward; childhood playmate, teenage lover, adult friend and mainstay, Poe has never disentangled himself from the emotional ties that Alison, afflicted with anorexia and a habitually unfaithful husband, exerts. But as Poe watches Alison’s tortured struggles with her own body, he begins to wonder whether her obsessive research into what went on in the Nevada desert three decades earlier might hold a key to the identity of the frighteningly animalistic murderer still at large...