Smoke from bushfires across country Victoria turn the twilit bay at St Kilda blood-red, and the uniformed cops pray for rain to ease the summer season of domestics. McCauley is called to the back of a café, where the corpse of Dallas Boyd lies. Seeing the syringe in Boyd’s arm, McCauley signs the report ‘nil suspicious circumstances’, but he orders a forensic pathology report and the death becomes very suspicious indeed.

McCauley’s investigation of Boyd’s death among the St Kilda squats is absorbing. While battling bureaucratic sclerosis, McCauley discovers an abusive stepfather, a girlfriend who is a prostitute, one mate who is dead and another who has burgled a house. McCauley suspects that Boyd was black mailing some dangerous criminals involved in child pornography.

Jarad Henry has created a convincing character in Rubens McCauley. The office politics and the dialogue among the cops are realistically cynical. McCauley is a complex, flawed human being and, as a narrator, is vulnerable to doubts, passions and thoughts which invite empathy rather than admiration. While McCauley might complain about an underside of St Kilda invisible to tourists, Henry’s evocation of the music, multiculturalism, waterfront and alternative atmosphere retains the suburb’s appeal. Readers will hope that McCauley reverses his decision to leave St Kilda and returns to act as catalyst in another Henry mystery.