Inspector Coleman got to know the highways and byways of the Rockhampton Police District because he'd served there for the term of his life as a police inspector. On retirement, he moved to the Serendipity Retirement Village in Brisbane and after a year as an undercover detective in the village, and a romance that wins him a new wife, he is able to fulfil his retirement dream of putting his most interesting cases in a book.

Concerned about his privacy, he changes his book name to Cole and Inspector Cole's cadavers turn up all over the Rockhampton Police District from the young man's body in a locked bedroom in Bluff, to the Police Sergeant knocked out and knifed near the Farnborough Sand dunes.

Over the years, police tape blossomed to delineate murder in erstwhile happy public places like Rockhampton's main street and a public bar in Yeppoon, or a bus shelter where tourists came and went, or a meat works that is the life and resource of a community. But what about the police tape that denied entry to a university student's room? Nothing unusual about that, there'd been a cadaver in there, but the University was the Kent State University on the edge of London. What was Inspector Cole doing over there?