Jonathan is an English investigator in an east European city. He searches for a young woman who has been missing for many years. All conventional means of tracing her have been exhausted, Jonathan is drawn to the psychic Gertrude: the girl is somewhere in the city - in a small room she cannot leave.

In other hands this may have been a run-of-the-mill abduction/rescue story but Jordan doesn't do run-of-the-mill, he has a lot more to offer.

Jonathan is consumed by jealousy, a rogue cuff-link confirms that his wife has slept with his assistant investigator, but Jordan doesn't use this betrayal as a mere construct to add relief from the main business of saving the missing girl. For The Drowned Detective, his inner turmoil IS the main business.

He rescues a young woman, a cello player, from the river and knows he should focus on repairing his own marriage but "Some things are just too strange. They should be left in the realm of possibility, or imagination. I had pulled her from the river, yes. I had helped her home. But the thought of some ultimate responsibility, some promise, like the promise of her tongue, darting between her lips, was too much, much too much. I felt I couldn't breathe, in that heat; I felt I was drowning in warm water."

And so Jonathan contrives to make his complicated life more complicated. He becomes ever more emotionally involved with the case of the missing girl, his relationship with his wife frays towards breaking point, the young woman he has saved offers respite, and maybe revenge, from his failing marriage, and the old woman, the psychic, offers redemption, at times through her supernatural powers, and at times through her worldly wisdom.

In an effort to reboot his failing marriage, he buys a set of Black Japanese pearls ( a symbol of hope for wounded hearts) for his wife but his life is already on a trajectory he can't control and he ends up buying her a fish instead.

"And I realised she was right. That the thing about people who know each other is that they know each other. Whatever love may exist between them has already been mediated by what they know of each other. The unexpected action, the wanted or unwanted gesture, happens on a landscape of anticipated sameness, so the simple and safe course of their day must now be interrupted by some obstacle they have to climb. And while the unexpected is so often what is demanded - by self-help books, magazine articles and marriage therapists - it causes problems of its own. And I wondered, was I going quietly mad? The pearls were a worry. But the fish was an absurdity."

Jonathan's painful search for the missing girl continues, it seems he knows less about the people he thinks he knows, or loves, and the further his life spirals out of control the more it seems Jonathan is also in a small room he cannot leave.