On the night the Used Women's Book Club meet to swap novels and exchange literary views, the husband of one of its members is being brutally murdered. It isn't the first time Rob has borrowed the Spitalfields flat of his childhood friend Larry to conduct an adulterous fling but it's certainly the last. Whoever came to the door that night was wielding a vicious weapon. This leaves Larry with a number of problems. Not the least of which is to find someone to clean up the scene of crime. Until he does he moves into his dad's old tug at Wapping Pier - joined at weekends by his six-year-old son, Ben. The grim wasteland of his youth has been transformed into the modern Docklands. But it seems to Larry, in a certain light and mood, 'as if all the luxury and wealth was so much designer stubble on the old sinner's face and it was still the secret haunt of Fagin and Bill Sykes'. Literary threads interweave this tense thriller. Virginia Woolf stalks its pages, along with Jack the Ripper, a crazed police detective and the spectre of an Avenging Angel. The individual members of the Used Women's Book Club - Jo, Meg, Liz and Amy - each have good reasons for feeling as used as the books they swap. And Larry, too, has a motive for murder