The first in the FFSG series.

Having endured all the slings, arrows and less rigid but more slushy mess Londoners can throw at a police officer, Detective Sergeant Frank Summers finds himself in summer in the chocolate-box little town of Wellbury. He now has time to indulge in his social life, and generally enjoy the good life.

Then his first big case comes up, known as 'The Dead Skeleton Case'. Within a short time he believes that he has solved it. Using an identity tag found with the skeleton he concludes that it is that of nineteen year-old Alfie Simmons, a rear gunner on a Lancaster, who had been lost when his bomber blew up close to its airfield while returning from a post-war trip to Germany in the summer of 1945. His body had never been recovered – until now.

For Frank this is a heaven-sent opportunity to appear to be hard-working while actually doing little other than going out on dates. Except this aim is rapidly overturned as the pathologist explains that, while the skeleton is undoubtedly that of one Alfie Simmons, he was actually shot and murdered somewhere around 1964.

Irritated at this intrusion into his social life, and piqued with curiosity, Frank begins to investigate the life and times of this anonymous little truck driver. And if he ever wanted romance and passion in his life, he gets it now. Only it's Alfie who is doing it. Instead of the staid and demure image of the 1940s and 1950s Frank had grown up with, he now discovers infidelity on a scale leading to outright bigamy. DNA tests show that some current old-age pensioners were far more liberal with their affections in their youth than their current outward appearance might indicate.

With his attention diverted he fails to pay attention to the goings-on around him. He seems to have accidentally acquired a possible girlfriend in the person of pathologist "Doctor Death", also known as the attractive young Susan Pleadle, who has a fine line in losing her temper with boyfriends. And then there's the woman police constable assigned to him for the duration, one large-bosomed Giggling Gertie, who can change moods from simmering feminist to Daddy's girl without changing gears. She also has a bad habit of asking questions a bachelor should never be asked, such as "Do you like children, and how many are you hoping to have?"

And then there's his boss, Inspector Frieda Garold, known in the station as Frigid Frieda, an extremely attractive but also extremely stern and forbidding figure who doesn't eat recalcitrant Detective Sergeants for breakfast, she uses them as toothpicks afterwards. Allegedly. That image lasts only up to the time she and Frank go undercover to attend a re-union barbecue of old war-friends. It begins with her instructions to him: "Don't let me have too much to drink. I have a very low alcohol tolerance level." What she fails to add is that that also comes with a very high amorous level.

What Frank finds ultimately puzzling is that these women in his life seem very forgiving of Alfie Simmons's outrageous treatment of the women in his own life, yet if Frank should dare even think of emulating him he will require hell to convert to ice cubes before being forgiven and then strangled. He thus has only one option: concentrate on the case. Discover who killed Alfie Simmons in the summer of 1964. Criminal colleagues who had fallen out? The man whose girlfriend he had got pregnant and deserted? The man whose girlfriend he had bigamously married? Or his wives when they had discovered each other?