It's Tucson, it's summer, and it is stinking hot.

Sturdy, stalwart Detective Marie Stransky has returned to work after the birth of her fifth baby, another girl, to find that "he's back."

Called to Santa Rita Park, a gathering place for the homeless and addicted, Marie studies the strangled body of a young woman. The cigarette burn on her right wrist pegs her as a victim of a stalker that has already killed two homeless women. Then there is the young Mexican woman found shot in a wash. Homicide department head, Lieutenant Carl Lindgrin, a man Marie loves to hate, dismisses the murder as gang related, but the tattoo of a unicorn on the girl's shoulder visible in the autopsy photo gives Marie pause. What self-respecting gangbanger has a tattoo of a unicorn? And the bodies pile up.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is filled with Gayle Jandrey's usual humor, dark and otherwise, typical array of quirky characters. All are woven through this tight, suspenseful police procedural-come-domestic melodrama like threads of bright yarn, that when pulled together make a whole cloth.