In Belfast, Northern Ireland, memories of the city's troubled history haunt every street corner, but for one tortured soul, the incredible violence in his past is also his most cherished legacy. Rea Carlisle--daughter of influential Stormont politician Graham Carlisle--has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn't take her long to clear out the dead man's remaining possessions, but one of the upstairs rooms remains stubbornly locked. When Rea finally forces it open, she discovers inside a chair, a table, and a leather-bound book, its pages filled with a host of chilling mementos, locks of hair, fingernails: a catalogue of victims. Horrified, Rea wants to go straight to the police but her father intervenes. Graham Carlisle has worked too hard to get where he is just to have his brother's twisted legacy ruin his own. Thwarted by her father, Rea turns to the only person she can think of: disgraced police inspector Jack Lennon, a man who also happens to have briefly been her lover. But Lennon somehow finds himself the lead suspect in a murder investigation led by one of the force's toughest cops, DCI Serena Flannagan. The suddenness of the murder and his implication in it, coupled with the story Rea brought to him, leaves Lennon more than a little suspicious that the two are related and that he has once again found himself lining up against people with power and influence. Lennon will risk everything to get to the bottom of this grisly conspiracy.