WITHOUT CONSENT: The crime of rape calls out for vengeance, but when the accused is a police officer, the outcry and penalty are worse, although in this case Helen West views the whole subject with a jaundiced eye. She doesn't even like the officer accused, the volatile and compulsively unfaithful DS Ryan, friend of her lover, Superintendent Bailey. Ryan maintains a stubborn silence in the face of the charge but when the physical evidence against him proves to be unusually strong, West and Bailey assume his guilt. Until slowly, preoccupied as they are with their own loves and loyalties, a different suspect begins to emerge. A man who believes that there is no such thing as rape and who corrupts his victim with her own shame and learns to kill with impunity...TRIAL BY FIRE: When the naked body of a woman is found near the Essex commuter village of Branston the locals are as baffled as they are shocked. A crime of passion? Surely not here. But when Crown Prosecutor Helen West and Detective Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey scratch at the thin veneer of gentility they discover a hidden world of passion, envy and betrayal - primed and ready to explode ...