The sugar house - Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan's life is back on course. She is where she likes to be: downtown Baltimore, her relationship with her boyfriend Crow is getting serious, she's beginning to make a name for herself as a PI, she's even banking good money.

And then her father asks her a favour: to investigate the death in prison of a friend's brother convicted of killing an unidentified girl, otherwise known as "Jane Doe". Tess's search for Jane Doe's real identity soon reveals that she is Gwen Schiller, a teenage heiress with a serious eating disorder who has recently escaped from "the Sugar House", an institution where bulimics and anorexics are subjected to the most brutal regimes.

Tess's enquiries as to Gwen's subsequent movements lead her first to a bar where the proprietor supplies something a lot more murky than food and wine, and then to the State Senate where two of the leading politicians appear to be living a double life.

But it is the links between Tess's father, a liquor licensing officer, and the bar that worry Tess the most. What favours has her father done the Baltimore underworld in order to stay in business? Why is he scared enough to beg Tess to drop the case? It is not until her parents' house is set on fire and a body pulled from the wreckage, that she realises that her life may have taken a very wrong turning indeed - one from which there is no going back.