Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene - 10-year-old Jessica found dead in the Laughterhouse, an old abandoned slaughterhouse. The killer was found and arrested. Fifteen years later, a new killer arrives in Christchurch, and he has a list of people who were involved in Jessica's murder case, one of whom is the unfortunate Dr. Stanton, a man with three young girls.

Joe Middleton doesn't remember killing anyone. He calls himself Joe Victim, but others know Joe as the infamous Christchurch Carver, and they want to see him dead. There's Melissa, Joe's accomplice in one of the murders, who plans on shooting him on his way to the courthouse before he gets a chance to start talking. Then there's Raphael, whose daughter was one of the Carver's victims.

People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn't make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn't make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he's asked by Green's father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time.

Twenty years ago a serial killer was caught, convicted, and locked away in New Zealand's most hellish penitentiary. That man was Edward's father. Edward has struggled his entire life to put the nightmares of his childhood behind him. But a week before Christmas, violence once again makes an unwelcome appearance in his world. Is Edward destined to be just like his father, to become a man of blood?

Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime-writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter - a name that has been keeping readers at the edges of their seats for more than a decade. Recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at the age of 49, Jerry's crime-writing days are coming to an end. His 12 books tell stories of brutal murders committed by bad men, of a world out of balance, of victims finding the darkest forms of justice.