The second stunning literary crime novel in the Song Cycle trilogy from the acclaimed author of Booker-longlisted Peacetime, and The Book of the Heathen.In this second book in the acclaimed trilogy that began with Cradle Song, Private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by the mother of a girl who disappeared a year earlier in violent and mysterious circumstances. Investigating both the background to this disappearance, and the man held to be responsible, Rivers is drawn through a long, hot summer into a world of human-trafficking and governmental corruption at every turn, each unraveled piece of the mystery moving him further from the vanished girl and deeper into a web of exploitation, greed, temptation, revenge and violence from which even he is eventually unable to extricate himself without unforeseen and tragic consequences.