Inspector Bill Slider is called upon to cope with a disfigured corpse grotesquely left in a children's playground in" Gone Tomorrow." His investigation plunges him into the shadow world behind the fashionable facade of Shepherd's Bush, among the victims of the welfare state and the crime barons who prey on them; a world where no one is who he says he is, and lying to the police is second nature. Slider's thankless task is to convince the witnesses, against all available evidence, that honesty really is the best policy. And with his lover Joanna away, fate seems suddenly determined to strew his private life with temptations. In "Dear Departed," it looks as though Slider has a serial killer in his territory. The Park Killer, as the media so innovatively labels him, attacks his victims in London's public parks, and when Chattie Cornfield is murdered while out jogging, the pattern fits. But as Slider and Atherton investigate, it is Chattie's life, rather than the killers, that poses questions. What was she involved with? Where did she spend the last day of her life? And was it love or hate that drove the hooded figure to kill her?