When Lindsey Fetter opened her eyes, the man who killed her husband stood at the end of her bed....

When Charlie Dunn pocketed his cell phone, he could only stare at the empty ice on Lake Michigan. The monster who killed his wife and son before his eyes had just been released from prison....

When Ellen Dumont visited her parent’s gravesite alone, it never occurred to her that quiet winter night would be her last moment on earth. Four hundred fifty murders is a slow year for the top Chicago homicide detective, Aaron Wolfe. He remembers everyone as if they just happened. Wolfe carries them with him everywhere he goes. Although he could not stop the memories, long ago he learned how to bury the pain so he could navigate the heinous carnage and hunt the monsters.

Years of the rising crimson tide and broken legal system became more than Wolfe could bear any longer. He was at capacity--too many innocent victims lived his his broken heart, and too many monsters escape justice through a myriad of legal cracks. On the eve of Wolfe's planned resignation, he opened his last email and read. The man he got convicted of the Dunn family killings would be released the next day—another legal maneuver, technicality, that denied true justice. When Wolfe had taken on the Fetter and Dumont cases, his world took a bizarre turn, something he had never seen before. The worst of the worst that beat the legal system in his city were being executed—sniper fire—and the snipers were found with skulls crushed by bare hands! Wolfe knew immediately there were two underground factions engaged in a dark war. One took justice into their own hands and the other wanted to stop them. The stealth war could change everything.

But can Wolfe allow it? Can the top homicide detective uncover the secret force on a reckless mission to remedy the failing criminal justice system? And can he stop the skull-crushing beast who terrorizes his city? Or will Wolfe succumb to his decades of scars and allow a new kind of justice to prevail in the city of predators?