Amazon.com description: Product Description: Jack Castleforde confounded his family when he announced his intention of joining the Metropolitan Police Force, thus breaking the long tradition amongst the Castleforde men of following a seafaring career. No amount of advice or persuasion was successful in diverting him from this course and so he had joined as a bobby on the beat and had now risen to the rank of Detective Inspector and the general opinion was that he could eventually go right to the top if he persevered in his choice, but would he do so? His mother believed in her secret heart that she knew when the seeds of his resolve took root in his mind and it was the day when Jack, then a fourteen year old schoolboy, had found the brutally despoiled body of a child from the village, a crime for which no one was ever brought to account. This was quickly followed by another tragedy, one which had an even greater impact on him, and was the first instance he had encountered of the ripples that evil makes as it sucks in more and more people in its ever-widening circles. He had always retained a great aversion to becoming embroiled in cases involving young children so was reluctant, to say the least, when he was called in to investigate the disappearance of a very young child and three adults from a rural community very similar to the one he had grown up in. Anne Marie Ryan's first crime novel.