• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2014 February #2
  It's 1968, and a young woman's body has been discovered in an Abbey Road alley, adjacent to the Beatles' London recording studio. DS Cathal Breen, inherently decent and skilled but despised by his fellow detectives, is shocked to be assigned the attention-grabbing case. The girl has no identification, and the scene revealed little physical evidence. Neighborhood gossips and some of Breen's colleagues suspect a Biafran immigrant new to the neighborhood, but Breen dismisses their blatantly racist theory, even though he has no other leads. Then, Breen finds a like mind when Women's Unit trainee Helen Tozer is assigned to shadow him. Together they identify the victim as one of the many devoted Beatles fans in constant vigil outside the studio of the recording company EMI. As they trace the girl's past and her London connections, they find the case's solution in a swirl of world politics, prejudice, and the hope of a generation in the midst of change. Police-procedural fans will revel in the skillfully conjured 1960s police politics, which are instantly absorbing through Breen's incorruptable, introspective, and sometimes naive point of view. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

<div><b>William Shaw</b> is an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books including <i>Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood</i>. Prior to becoming a crime writer, he worked at the post-punk magazine ZigZag and a journalist for <i>The Observer</i>, <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>Wired</i>, <i>Arena</i>, and <i>The Face</i>. He lives in Sussex, England.</div>