After two years in the Seattle Police Homicide Unit, Detective Alice Madison seems to have found the kind of peace in her personal and professional life that she has not known before.
When an ordinary burglary turns into a horrific murder she is put in charge of the investigation and finds herself tracking a killer whose pleasure it is to destroy his victims.
The DNA from a single strand of hair leads Madison and her partner Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown to a series of old cases and she realizes that she might be hunting a killer who has been stalking the city for years and whose existence is the stuff of myth in high-security prisons. A killer who might still be at large because Brown made a mistake seven years earlier.
Madison’s own past comes under scrutiny when Internal Affairs officers begin to investigate her and she realises that enemies close to home want her to fail. In the middle of the storm Madison and her partner must hunt down a skillful, determined murderer with a talent for death. And Madison’s private life and fragile peace fall apart.
Extract:
Prologue
August 1992
Alice Madison, twelve years of age, listened out for sounds beyond
the hammering of her heart. All was quiet. The rain tapped over the
trees outside and the road that led to Friday Harbor was blessedly
empty this time of day. Mrs Quint from next door would get up any
minute now and feed her chickens and Alice had to decide quickly
whether to rush and be out of the house before that blabbermouth
was in her yard or delay until she had gone back into her kitchen
and out of sight. It was hardly a choice: Alice wanted – needed – to
get out of there as fast as her feet would carry her.
She took stock of her bedroom: everything wrecked, broken,
smashed. Alice took a deep breath and grabbed her rucksack. She
crammed in a few essentials and one book she couldn’t bear to
leave behind – Treasure Island, which her mother used to read to
her – and managed to tie her sleeping bag in a tight bundle at the
bottom of the bag.
Her eyes moved over the familiar surfaces, the familiar objects.
She couldn’t stay and, one way or the other, she wouldn’t come
back: all her life up to that point would be held in that rucksack,
and Alice had to travel light.
She stood on tiptoe and took down from a shelf a pink wooden
box that had survived the onslaught. She emptied the beaded
bracelets and the WWF badges with the mournful panda onto her
unmade bed and lifted the fake bottom: three tight rolls of banknotes
had been flattened, held together by elastic hairbands. She
shoved them into her jeans back pocket and placed the box on her
bedside table. Her Mickey Mouse clock told her it was 7.03 a.m. She
picked up her baseball bat and her mitt – the ball went into a pocket
of the rucksack – and surveyed her room. Time to go.
Alice tiptoed down the hall, stopping only to listen to her father’s
breathing and snoring lightly in his room. She closed the front
door behind her and started down the side of the house, long steps,
almost but not quite running. She was pleased she didn’t have to
push the creaking garage door open: her red bicycle was leaning
as usual against the work table. She walked it up to the road, got
on and pushed off.
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