Summer in the city.

A murder
they didn't want solved.

Welcome to Singapore.

Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID has been something of a reluctant policeman for nearly twenty years. He is a little overweight, a little lonely, a little grumpy, and he smokes way too much. When he thinks back on it, he’s not even sure why he became a policeman in the first place. The thing of it is this: he’s stayed a detective for only one reason really. He is very, very good at it.

A maid checking rooms at the Singapore Marriott finds the battered body of a woman beaten to death and obscenely posed across a bed. Not a great many women are beaten to death in five-star hotels in Singapore, at least not foreign women and certainly not under circumstances so macabre, but the suite is supposed to be empty so there is no registration information. Neither is there any luggage, any jewelry, or even any clothes. A fingerprint search turns up nothing. Forget finding the murderer. Tay’s first problem is to figure out who the victim is.

Then he does find out, and he almost wishes he hadn’t.

The FBI tells Tay his body is that of the wife of the American Ambassador to Singapore. That makes the murder an act of international terrorism, they say, and the case belongs to them under American antiterrorism laws. Tay isn’t so sure about that, but his boss at CID tells him to stop making trouble. He’s happy to dump the case on the Americans.

Then, just when Tay wonders if things can get any worse, they get a lot worse. A second body turns up, a second foreign woman beaten to death and posed in a similar way. But this woman isn’t an ambassador’s wife. This woman is an ambassador.

The FBI has no doubt now that is is dealing with international terrorists, but Tay hears different whispers. There is a serial killer stalking American women in the diplomatic community, the whispers say. The killer is sexually motivated, the whispers continue. More women will be murdered, the whispers predict.

Inspector Tay understands that, and it worries the hell out of him. There’s one thing he really can’t understand, however.
 
Why is it that nobody — not the FBI, not the American ambassador, not even his own boss at CID — seems to want Tay to find the killer before he strikes again?