DS Stella Mooney

Once she had been beautiful. Now she was eight days dead, her body slashed with more than fifty cuts. Janis Parker - young, successful and glamorous - had shared her modern Notting Hill apartment with flatmate Stephanie James. But now Janis is dead - and Stephanie has disappeared. Heading up the investigation, Detective Stella Mooney soon has her first suspect, in the shape of Mark Ross - Stephanie's boyfriend and Janis's secret lover ... But then another body is discovered - slashed fifty times. Clearly these are no domestic killings. It seems Stella and her team are looking for that most dangerous of creatures: a killer who hunts to feed a terrible appetite. But the truth is they are up against something even more terrifying...

The brutalized corpse of a young woman has just been discovered. When Robert Kimber walks into a Notting Hill police station and confesses to the murder, it's an open-and-shut case-just what the police want this close to Christmas. But, Stella has her doubts. And, if their suspect didn't commit the murder, who did? Someone without a conscience. Someone who will tap into Kimber's disturbed mind. Someone who needs an apprentice for the dark business he has planned...

The naked body of a young woman is found hanging from a tree on a London roadside. Scrawled across her back are the words "DIRTY GIRL." Detective Stella Mooney is faced with a murder as baffling as it is chilling. With no means to identify the victim and no apparent motive, the case is blocked, until a man is found on a bench by the river, his throat cut back to the vertebrae. And, as before, the killer has left a trademark comment: "FILTHY COWARD." Stella and her team can see there's a connection--but what? One victim is a young girl, maybe one of the hookers who work the Strip; the other, a researcher for a prominent and controversial member of Parliament. More evidence is needed. And soon enough it comes: another death; another message....