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A murdered family. A dying serial killer. A missing child. DC Max Wolfe hunts a pitiless killer through the streets of London. By the Sunday Times number one bestselling author of The Murder Bag.

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´This is brilliant stuff!´ Peter James

A murdered family. A dying serial killer. A missing child. DC Max Wolfe hunts a pitiless killer through the streets of London. By the Sunday Times number one bestselling author of The Murder Bag.

On New Year´s Day, a wealthy family is found slaughtered inside their exclusive gated community in north London, their youngest child stolen away.

The murder weapon - a gun for stunning cattle before they are butchered - leads Detective Max Wolfe to a dusty corner of Scotland Yard´s Black Museum devoted to a killer who thirty years ago was known as the Slaughter Man.

But the Slaughter Man has done his time, and is now old and dying. Can he really be back in the game?

And was the murder of a happy family a mindless killing spree, a grotesque homage by a copycat killer - or a contract hit designed to frame a dying man?

All Max knows is that he needs to find the missing child and stop the killer before he destroys another innocent family - or finds his way to his own front door ...

Even the happiest of families have black, twisted secrets that someone is ready to kill for...

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"Told with striking clarity and insight, this novel confirms Parsons has earned a place at the very pinnacle of British crime writing" Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

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Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and was working on the night shift at Gordon´s Gin Distillery in Islington when he was offered his first job in journalism on the New Musical Express .

Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages, most recently Vietnamese. His semi-autobiographical novel Man and Boy won the Book of the Year prize.

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