QuincyNoguchi
John Campbell has served the State of New York for thirty years as a law enforcement officer, and in that time he has been exposed to death in many forms. But this familiarity has not prepared him for his latest investigation, which begins when a young woman’s body is discovered in a forgotten shaft. Her body has been desecrated beyond anything John has seen, and the veteran investigator realizes he is on the hunt for a monster.
The monster he is tracking conducts his craft not to extinguish life but to honor it, creating his own perverted representations of the classics for his private collection. To achieve this purpose raw material is needed, and to this end he has collected over sixty men and women in a career that spans almost two decades. But working in the medium of living flesh is difficult, and only a select few of his pieces live up to his demanding expectations. Those that do not are discarded.
Of the fifty or so that have been cast-off only eleven have been found, each without a name, identified only by the unique wound pattern the monster is known to inflict on his victims. For the past seventeen years these eleven have been documented and studied by Ellen Nguyen, a behavioral analyst with the FBI. When John turns up the twelfth victim Ellen is on a plane to New York, hoping that with a fresh body will come fresh evidence.
Running into one dead end after another, the two investigators know that their only chance is to lower themselves into the depths the monster has created, hoping that the abyss of evil they find won’t claim their very souls.