This fictional account of the 1953 death by suicide of mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing reveals much about the attitudes of that time period. Detective Constable Leonard Corell suspects the death may have been a murder because of all the secrecy surrounding Turing's work during World War II. In the 1950s England was consumed with the idea of homosexuals in the intelligence divisions for fear that they would succumb to blackmail or were just too unstable to be trusted with top secret information. This fear was exacerbated by two homosexual men who were actually Soviet spies which made Turing guilty by association. At that time the work at Bletchley Park on the German Enigma Machine was still classified and even the police weren't let in on its secrets. When Corell is ordered to abandon his investigation he continues while off-duty and eventually finds himself in danger for asking too many questions and soliciting information from the "wrong" people. The story is intriguing and the viewpoint on the 1950s Red Scare is well-handled.
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