The Coffin Tree grew in London's Second City The upper branches had been struck by lightning which would have killed most trees, but not this one Near it, a shrouded body had been burnt on what looked like a funeral pyre Had the victim voluntarily climbed onto the fire, as one eyewitness reports, or was it murder? The frazzled corpse turns out to be only one of a whole sweep of killings in a case that begins with the death of two of John Coffin's own detectives and which forces him to question his own judgement and to confront the untapped mysteries of another human heart