The long awaited sequel to Nothing Is Sacrosanct has arrived.
Although this is 'stand-alone' detective novel, it brings the events of the late 1990's to a conclusion.
The hunt is on for what appears to be a ‘copy-cat’ killer of paedophiles. Marcus Hartstein; lover, adventurer, executioner, was reported dead in 2006 but more bodies have been appearing – all with the same M.O as Hartstein’s.
DCI Christine Ling was on the original case, hunting him down in Nothing is Sacrosanct. Now she and her husband, Clive Moran, a police profiler, have been brought out of retirement to solve these new murders, but the clues are few, and the suspects are untouchable.
Read the opening chapter which sets the scene;
Chapter 1
Deep within us, there is a dormant, dark, embryo. An embryo containing another us - another you. Mostly, due to good parenting, a stoic education, peer assertiveness, and of course, in part for some, religious guilt, these dormant seeds never surface - and we lead good, normal healthy lives - that is, most of us do.
Ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Neighbours, work colleagues, relatives. Public figures; entertainers, politicians, clergymen, businessmen - all going about their lives, day in, day out. We pay them no heed. They pay us no heed. Invisible, yet recognisable. So what is it that changes a person’s inner soul - releases the dark-matter? Makes them want to destroy life - a young life, without remorse, without shame or understanding for the wider grief they inflict - what makes them a sex predator - a paedophile.
Between 1969 and 1999 there was a man who took it upon himself to hand out retribution to those individuals who had escaped justice for heinous acts of abuse, rape, and even murder. The condemned men in question were ‘low life’, with little self-esteem, unemployed or in low-paid employment, usually centred around, or in close proximately to children. One of them, however, was in a different level of employment and trust - he was a Priest. Father Peter Dunfold was spared the indignity of his pursuer’s usual reckoning - hanging by a rope and deprived of his genitalia - as he was arrested and sent to trial, receiving a life sentence based on video evidence. During the investigation in the mid-1990s, it was thought Dunfold and others were part of a wider circle of child abusers, but no other names were revealed by Dunfold during his interrogation. The only important evidence was a coded notebook found at Dunfold’s house and sent to the investigating officer, DI Christine Ling. The ‘evidence’ mysteriously disappeared when Chief Superintendent James Jarvis claimed he knew someone who could decipher it. The one entry in the notebook DI Ling remembered before its disappearance was 'Sleek vital demon'. The only two people outside the case to know this, was a crossword compiler, Graham King, who was asked to decipher it, and Mandy Silver, to whom he eventually gave the answer. Both have since died - he from a heart attack, and she in a hit and run car incident.