Jan Fabel is a haunted man. Head of the Polizei Hamburg's Murder Commission, Fabel has dealt with the dead for nearly two decades, but when a routine enquiry becomes a life-threatening - and life-changing - experience, he finds himself on much closer terms with death than ever before. Two years later, Fabel's first case at the Murder Commission comes back to haunt him: Monika Krone's body is found at last, fifteen years after she went missing. Monika - ethereally beautiful, intelligent, cruel - was the centre of a group of students obsessed with the gothic. Fabel re-opens the case. What happened that night, when Monika left a party and disappeared into thin air? When men involved with Monika start turning up dead, Fabel realizes he is looking for a killer with both a hunger for revenge and a taste for the gothic. What he doesn't know is that someone has been aiding and grooming a deranged escapee as his own, personal tool for revenge. A truly gothic monster to be let loose on the world.

Author Biography

Craig Russell is the author of the Jan Fabel thrillers set in contemporary Hamburg and the Lennox series set in 1950s Glasgow. He is the only non-German to have been awarded the Polizeistern (Police Star) by the Polizei Hamburg. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Golden Dagger, the French Prix Polar, the 2012 Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year and the 2013 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and has won the CWA Dagger in the Library and the 2015 Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year