Aud Torvingen returns--against her better instincts--scarred, heartbroken, changed, but tougher and rougher than ever.

There is no perfect security. There's always something. Always.

The steely shell of Nicola Griffith's seemingly indomitable protagonist Aud Torvingen appears to be cracking. The six-foot-tall fury--who proved in The Blue Place and Stay that she can (and just might) kill you as easily as look at you--has taken on a new challenge: teaching a group of ordinary women self-defense skills. The consequences shake her to the core.

Meanwhile, her investigation of what had seemed to be run-of-the-mill real estate fraud is turning out to be more than she bargained for, and draws her from steamy Atlanta to lush, cool Seattle. Which also happens to be home to her most daunting foil yet: her mother.

In intertwined Seattle and Atlanta narratives, Aud is shocked, challenged, drugged, blown up, falls in love--and, faced with the limits of self-reliance and the scary and beautiful prospect of allowing oneself to depend on other people, Aud changes, again. And Always, the final entry in Nicola Griffith's Aud Torvingen trilogy, solidifies her place as the most complex and irresistible hero in new-wave crime fiction.