A gripping psychological mystery from one of Europe's best-selling crime novelists.

Would you confide your most intimate secrets to a stranger? Hella Moormann, a pharmacist, finds herself doing just this when she meets the unprepossessing Rosemarie Hirte in hospital.

Hella has always suffered from a need to nurture lost souls, but she believes her latest lover will be different. Levin, a beautiful young dental student, is heir to his grandfather's fortune and looks like a good thing. All too soon, though, her faith is shaken: not only does he take an unhealthy interest in some antique poison bottles, but he also plans to misuse his dental skills in a macabre way.

Hella's life takes an increasingly bizarre course, from involvement with drug runners to murder, via adultery and much else. But is she the helpless victim of fate or a cunning manipulator of events? Whatever the truth, in choosing to tell her story to the anonymous Rosemarie Hirte, she may have made a lethal mistake, for Hirte has a sinister secret of her own...