A deranged predator on the rampage, a man with a terrible, drug fuelled obsession, a monster who thinks he's a god. The discovery of a decapitated body signals the start of a living nightmare for Inspector Alison Dexter. As she struggles to co-ordinate the manhunt, Dexter is suddenly forced to confront two demons from her own past: the arrival of a man that poisoned her career and the resurrected memory of a life she had to destroy. Returning to New Bolden CID after medical leave, John Underwood leams that Jack Harvey - the police psychiatrist that saved his own sanity - has been murdered. Events take on an added urgency when Harvey's wife is savagely abducted. Baffled by the killer's crazed modus operandi, Underwood becomes entangled in Dexter's investigation and eventually finds assistance from the unlikeliest of sources.

Eight years ago, the national tabloids had a feeding frenzy over the 'Primal Cut' killings. The Garrod brothers, East End butchers, had turned their expertise to rendering human flesh. The case made DS Alison Dexter notorious. She identified the murderers and ended their orgy of killing, but in the process took what Bartholomew Garrod most valued: his brother's life. With her career in ruins and her personal safety in jeopardy, Dexter was transferred to Cambridgeshire. Now Dexter finds herself drawn into an investigation probing the underbelly of the area's crime scene - bare-knuckle boxing, dog fights and murder. As she gets closer to the truth, it's clear Garrod hasn't forgotten the debt she owes him - he wants his pound of flesh and will do whatever it takes to get it.

An international sports star is found murdered—her face mutilated in a bizarre, ritualistic manner. What is the significance of the poetic text the killer has left at the crime scene? Why did he surgically remove the victim's left eye? And can a Cambridge lecturer help the police reconstruct the killer's fantasy in time to save her own life? As Inspector John Underwood and his team work frantically to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an unexpected turn. Harrington's murderer contacts English literature lecturer Heather Stussmann and invites her to explain his actions to the police. But another murder will take place before Stussmann finds the key to understanding the killer's terrifying motive, which lies buried in the works of a poet who has been dead for nearly four hundred years. In The Yeare's Midnight, author Ed O'Connor has created a villain with an intellect as cunning as it is monstrous. Donne's cerebral poems, such as...