Chattie Cornfeld was murdered while jogging in the park. She ran her own small marketing company and lived comfortably, perhaps too comfortably for her income. At first it looked as though she was the latest victim of the "Park Killer," but it doesn't take Slider and Atherton long to establish that someone was trying to pass the killing off as part of a pattern—only the pattern doesn't fit, this one was personal. Chattie was popular with all who crossed her path, and it was difficult to imagine she had gained any enemies. Turning to the two most popular motives for murder—money and passion—Slider and his team's investigation turn up some puzzling anomalies in her life, not least the number of men who counted themselves as her lover and the tangled relationships of her family. But none of the suspects can be made to fit what evidence they have, unless of course they've been mis-reading the evidence.

Inspector Bill Slider is called upon to cope with a disfigured corpse grotesquely left in a children's playground in Gone Tomorrow. His investigation plunges him into the shadow world behind the fashionable facade of Shepherd's Bush, among the victims of the welfare state and the crime barons who prey on them; a world where no one is who he says he is, and lying to the police is second nature. Slider's thankless task is to convince the witnesses, against all available evidence, that honesty really is the best policy. And with his lover Joanna away, fate seems suddenly determined to strew his private life with temptations. In Dear Departed, it looks as though Slider has a serial killer in his territory. The Park Killer, as the media so innovatively labels him, attacks his victims in London's public parks, and when Chattie Cornfield is murdered while out jogging, the pattern fits. But as Slider and Atherton investigate, it is Chattie's life, rather than the killers, that poses questions. What was she involved with? Where did she spend the last day of her life? And was it love or hate that drove the hooded figure to kill her?