Detective Carol Wren faces her grisliest case yet. It’s one of the worst things Detective Carol Wren has ever seen. The body is discovered in an alleyway behind Buns ‘n’ Bread, the local bakery. The dead woman is thin to the point of starvation; her skin pockmarked with cigarette burns. She’s been cut open, the wounds sewn up with lurid green thread. A pile of discarded skin lies beside her. The contents of the dead woman’s handbag reveal that she is Karen Stokes, who left her local pub after a night out three years earlier—and was never seen again. So where has she been all this time? As Carol digs further, she discovers that two other women went missing around the same time. All three women had been drinking in the same pub the night they disappeared. All three had curly, blonde hair. But the cases were never linked. The night Karen’s body is discovered, another local woman disappears. Carol and her team are in a race against time before she meets the same gruesome fate as Karen Stokes.