Trouble seems to follow Chief Superintendent George Gently even on a French vacation. While day-dreaming by the quaint old harbour in Honfleur, violence strikes. First he is thrown into the water, then shortly afterwards someone tries to shoot him, narrowly missing him on two occasions. Gently is mystified, as are the Honfleur police. He knows of no enemies, French or English, or of any reason why anyone should be after him. Local police think he may have upset the plans of a thief stalking the Antiques Fair just opening in Honfleur, but senior officials from Paris have a much graver theory. In company with the charming Gabrielle Orbec - who may or may not be an accomplice of Gently's attacker - Gently plays the role of decoy. Apparently just a sightseer on the beaches of Normandy and in the sunlit, cobbled market squares, Gently, with the French Surete close behind, lays a trap for a very much wanted man. **

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many suspects, too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull and dump him in the river.

If a tiger mauled a man to death, would he bother burying the corpse? An escaped tiger that terrorizes a little market town is shot dead by a police marksman, having caused nothing more than a minor panic. A year later, a man is found mauled to death and neatly buried in his own back garden. The only thing Gently can be sure of is that the tiger didn't bury the body, so who did?