Murder and depravity are Police Commissioner AmÔedÔee Mallock’s daily bread. As far as he is concerned, mankind has been thoroughly abandoned by God, and the visions that haunt him do nothing to disabuse him of this notion. But nothing he has encountered has prepared him for the sudden appearance of a serial killer dubbed “the Make-up Artist.” The bodies of the killer’s first victims, found in four separate neighborhoods of Paris, are monstrous works of art, baroque masterpieces of depravity, demented expressions of corrupted piety. These crimes are unprecedented in their ferocity and their intricacy, and the deeper Mallock investigates the greater the mysteries and the enigmas. Foremost among them: is a solution to a series of crimes behind which the devil himself seems to lurk even conceivable?