“Pain was a harvest like any other, it must be used, not allowed to go to waste.”

Certainly no shortage of pain in this book, which has one thing after another on two fronts, domestic and exotic—rape and murder are just the top of the list.  However somehow amidst all the dark stuff one manages to get attached to the sympathetic characters and root for them to survive (not all do). The wildest and most exhausting of the Paget series.