The photos pinned to the Strategy Wall in Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq's office prove that he and his colleagues are up against a monster this time — or is it monsters?

First there's the baffling murder by incineration of eight people in Britain, which seems to have been done simply to steal a corpse. Next it's two Canada Customs officials who are killed so the corpse can be smuggled into Vancouver. Mixed in with these mysteries is a local porn king, a network of wealthy connoisseurs obsessed with made-to-order snuff videos, and a slew of deformed bodies that are being dumped around the Gulf Islands.

Then there's the madman the Mounties don't know about. The psycho to end all psychos, who has confounded them before. And this time he's looking for diabolical revenge...

Michael Slade's profile page

MICHAEL SLADE is a criminal lawyer and the author of fourteen dark mystery thrillers. As a lawyer, his specialty is the law of insanity and he has acted in over one hundred murder cases. The Slade thrillers fuse the genres of police procedure, whodunit, history, suspense, and horror. In researching these plots, he has travelled around the world, from climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops to descending into the secret cannibal cave of the Cook Islands. For more on the real-life story behind each of his novels, visit Morgue at Slade’s website, www.specialx.net.