Merry Christmas ... Daddy!
A stomach-churning corpse in a near derelict house
Three missing children - one dead
Drug-dealers, pornographers, paedophiles
And then ... a second corpse!
On a dreary Friday night
at the beginning of December, Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener was called
away from a family celebration to investigate the discovery of a body. The
signs suggested it was not going to be an open-and-shut case: a run-down Victorian
property in the drug-ridden suburb of Rawston near Leeds with distraught,
ashen-faced police constables, and an experienced medic refusing to touch
the body. And when Gardener witnessed the nauseating corpse, he realised his
instincts had been right.
During the investigation, Gardener and his partner Sean Reilly found themselves
drawn unwittingly into a close-knit community of drug-dealers, perverts and
pornographers.
They had little time to recuperate before a second body, showing exactly the
same MO was found in the grounds of a small church in the centre of Leeds.
A chance encounter with a well-spoken tramp leads Gardener and Reilly back
to an entertainment agent, which then creates a new twist to the case as Gardener
finds paedophiles and department store Santa’s added to his list of problems.
Gardener’s already overburdened work schedule was stretched beyond endurance.
Over the last six months, children had been going missing: the dead body of
the third missing child having recently been found on waste ground - naked,
had instigated a murder hunt.
He now knows he is looking for a deranged serial killer, but are the cases
connected?
With a complex murder case to unravel, the last thing he needs is another
problem ... but life is about to deal Stewart Gardener a whole new deck of
cards when the next child to go missing is his own...