When the naked, mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is put on the case. As one after another victim is found in various locations all over London, each with a different mutilation but the same index number carved into their skin, Barnes and the police work frantically to figure out how the corresponding files are connected. With no clues to be found in the present, Barnes must now search the archives of the past to solve the mystery behind a string of 100-year-old murders. Only then will it be possible to stop the present series of gruesome killings, but will they be able to do so before the killer ensnares his next victim? Barnes, Foster, and Jenkins enter a race against time – and before the end of the investigation, one of them will get much too close for comfort.

Katie Drake was an affluent single mother living in Queen's Park - until someone cut her throat and tore out her tongue. Worse still, the killer has abducted her fourteen-year-old daughter, Naomi. Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster quickly sees chilling parallels with the disappearance of teenager Leonie Stamey three years earlier. With hopes fading of finding Naomi alive, he calls on genealogist Nigel Barnes to piece together the links between the families of the two girls. The trail leads Nigel back to 1890, when a young couple arrived in the UK. A husband and wife fleeing a terrible crime in their past, and harbouring a secret that's now having bloody repercussions in the present.

Northumberland; 1992. In the early years of his police career, a young and idealist Grant Foster investigates a crime that shocks the nation. A widower beaten to death in a sleepy former mining town. The murderers: two schoolboys aged 9 and 10. Eight years later, they are released from prison and disappear into adult life with new identities. London; present day. DCI Foster investigates the death of a man found incinerated in his own car. But this isn't an isolated crime and as more gruesome murders come to light, he soon finds himself forced to confront not only that hideous scene from all those years ago, but also his own memories . . . From the author of the award-winning The Blood Detective comes the long-awaited third book in the series. A crime novel about secrets, the ghosts of hideous crimes – and a past that refuses to die.