This is the fourth of six Bryant and May novels, and my gratitude goes out to the indispensable team who are with me on the trip. Huge thanks to my agent Mandy Little, for her limitless energy and enthusiasm, and to Meg Davis for sage advice and encouragement.

A controversial artist is found dead, displayed as part of her own outrageous installation. No suspects, no motive, no evidence.Only a witness who swears the killer was a masked highwayman on a black horse...

In the face of others' disbelief, it's very much business as usual for the octogenarian detectives Arthur Bryant and John May. Then the perpetrator is spotted at the scene of his next outlandish murder.It seems he's intent on ridding London of certain minor celebrities while becoming one himself as the tabloids begin stirring up 'Highwayman Fever'.

Baffled by a case that involves everything from bitter artistic rivalries and sleazy sex to gang warfare and the Knights Templar,Bryant and May know that, to crack it, they must use every orthodox - and unorthodox - means at their disposal. Not least because it looks as though these deaths are connected to a decades-old killing spree that nearly destroyed the two partners once before...and might yet again.