Will’s first thought when he saw the man’s face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out. When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker are called upon to investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay Cambridge academic, their first thoughts are of an ill-judged sexual encounter, of rough trade gone wrong. But as their investigation widens, their attention focuses on the biography Bryan was writing about the life and death of fifties film star, Stella Leonard, whose death from drowning, when the car she was driving skidded mysteriously off a lonely Fenland road, uncannily echoed the climax of her most notorious film, Shattered Glass.