Elena, a student at St Stephen's College, Cambridge, lived a life of casual but intense physical relationships, with scores to settle and goals to achieve - that is, until someone bludgeoned her to death. The University called in the Yard and Lynley and Havers enter the rarified world where donnish intellect is often allied to intrigue. They find a tangled skein of love, obsession and desire, a world of emotion upon whose altar Elena was sacrificed.