The Gilded Madonna

Halloran pulled the sheet down to the man's waist. What I saw made me take a deep breath: the man's throat was cut so deeply his head looked like it had almost been severed."If you tell me this man was found in the public toilet behind the grandstand of Coogee Oval opposite where I live, I might just need a chair," I said.Clyde Smith's quiet, happy life, in love for the first time, working as a private detective and journalist, is suddenly thrown into disarray by the appearance, after a three year hiatus, of a body bearing the distinctive hallmarks of a string of murders he hadn't been able to solve when working in homicide.Forced to cooperate with the new detective sergeant who'd taken his place in the local cop shop, Clyde has to not only deal with the enormous chip on the young man's shoulder, but also with a complex case that involves kidnapping, the re-emergence of the Silent Cop Killer, the historical abuse of young men and boys in orphanages across...