The Granite City's seedy side is about to be exposed.... A serial rapist is leaving a string of tortured women behind him, but while DS Logan McRae's girlfriend, PC Jackie 'Ball Breaker' Watson, is out acting as bait, he's trying to identify a blood-drenched body dumped outside Accident and Emergency. Logan's investigations suggest someone in the local bondage community has developed a taste for violent death, and he soon finds himself dragged into the twilight world of pornographers, sex-shops and S&M.

Detective Inspector Logan McRae is finally getting back on his feet after the events of the last few years. Putting things behind him. Getting better.… But it was never going to last. A body turns up on the outskirts of Aberdeen: burned from the neck up, hands chained behind the back. More murders follow - all gruesome, and with only one obvious connection. The similarities between the real-life killings and the plot of a best-selling novel about witchcraft seem more than coincidental, but the more Logan digs the more dangerous and blurred the line between fact and fiction becomes.

Aberdeen's growing Polish community is under attack from a serial offender who leaves mutilated victims to be discovered on building sites - eyes gouged out and the sockets burned. Detective Sergeant Logan McRae is assigned to the investigation, codenamed Operation Oedipus, but with the victims too scared to talk, it's going nowhere fast.

Richard Knox has served his time, so why shouldn’t he be allowed to live wherever he wants? Yes, in the past he was a violent rapist, but he’s seen the error of his ways. Found God. Wants to leave his dark past in Newcastle behind him and make a new start. Or so he says. Detective Sergeant Logan McRae isn’t exactly thrilled to be part of the team helping Knox settle into his new Aberdeen home.

It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch: strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he's only the first. There's a serial killer stalking the Granite City, and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die.