Brian Connell was a photographer with a short attention span where wives were concerned; he went through three of them in five years. But that didn't mean he was guilty of murder, and it didn't stop him from dashing off to photograph an erupting volcano, accompanied by writer turned detective Jessica Hughes. Her job is not only to report on the eruption, but to keep Brian out of the clutches of the law until she and partner Philip Burgess can track down a killer who is as hard to pin down as a cloud of volcanic ash.

The Ash Cloud is the second novel in the China Cove Mystery series.