Christine Steinmeyer thought the anonymous suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve wasn’t meant for her. But the man calling in to her radio show seems convinced otherwise. Bit by bit, her life is turned upside down. Martin Servaz is on leave in a clinic for depressed cops, haunted by his childhood sweetheart’s kidnapping by his psychopathic nemesis. One day, he receives a key card to a hotel room --- the room where an artist committed suicide a year earlier. Servaz soon uncovers evidence of a truly terrifying crime. Could someone really be cruelly, consciously hounding women to death?

In the middle of a World Cup match in June 2010, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic email indicating that Julian Hirtmann, the most twisted of all serial killers, is back…and hitting a little too close to home. With the help of detectives Irene Ziegler and Esperandieu, Servaz will have to uncover a world of betrayal and depravity to connect the dots between these gruesome murders that keep reopening wounds from his past.

One winter morning, a group of workers discover the headless, flayed body of a horse, hanging suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. There’s something disturbing about this crime that Commandant Martin Servaz can’t ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of an asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the horse carcass. And a few days later, the first human murder takes place. A dark story of madness and revenge seems to be unfolding.