This is the fourth of the crime novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler.

A gunman is terrorising young women in the Cathedral town of Laffteron. What - if anything - links the apparently random murders? Is the marksman with the rifle the same as the killer with the handgun? "The Vows of Silence" is a sequel to the "Various Haunts of Men", "The Pure in Heart" and "The Risk of Darkness".

'This is a crime series that specialises in sidestepping conventions, always to exhilarating effect...These books succeed in harnessing all the genre's addictive power while maintaining a complexity and fascination entirely their own'
Independent