JONATHAN HAYES

As a criminal pathologist, Dr Edward Jenner has seen many bad deaths in his day, but none as crazed as the ritual slayings perpetrated by Robert Farrar, The Inquisitor. He survived the denouement of Farrar's killing spree, but not the fall-out from the authorities which saw his medical license suspended and him banished from New York to Florida.

'They found her in the East Village, nailed to the wall of a railroad flat'. Dr. Edward Jenner is a New York forensic pathologist: he has attended countless murder scenes and performed thousands of autopsies but the killing of 21 year old Andie Delore is different. The naked body is marked with an indecipherable ancient script and is arranged in the shape of a ritual sacrifice. The murderer poses as a cop. The sole eye witness is Andie's flatmate, Ana da Jong. She can't trust the police anymore. Instead she turns to Jenner for help. But then a second victim is found in rural Pennsylvania. Her head has been placed in a puddle of milk. And then the third. Another decapitation: her naked torso is decorated with exotic bird feathers...Both corpses have the same mysterious script. The killer is leading Jenner and Ana into his own private nightmare. A place for which there will be no escape.