Blood inheritance

Detective Tom Thorne is back... and he needs to act fast.

At first glance, the evidence points to yet another crime of passion that Inspector Tom Thorne is tired of dealing with - until a bloody piece of X-ray is found in the clenched fist of a woman's corpse on the kitchen floor of his home, and it becomes obvious that this is a much more complicated case than it seems.

Tom Thorne discovers that the victim's mother had also been murdered 15 years earlier, at the hands of the monstrous serial killer Raymond Garvey. The manhunt for Garvey was one of the largest in English police history and resulted in the death of seven women. However, he was arrested and died of a brain tumor while serving his sentence.

As more bodies and X-ray fragments are found, the police officer discovers that the deaths are connected and finds himself faced with a macabre puzzle. Piece by piece, the picture comes together, and a sinister plot is revealed: the new killer is eliminating all the children of Raymond Garvey's victims.

Tom Thorne needs to act fast and protect those still on the criminal's list, but nothing and no one is what they seem. Not when you're dealing with one of the craziest and most unhinged killers ever to walk the planet...

Mark Billingham received the 2003 Sherlock Holmes Award for Best Detective and in 2005 he won the Theakston Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel.

"Mark Billingham is the new exponent of detective fiction." - Lee Child, author of The Last Shot, the book that inspired the film Jack Reacher

""Splendid from beginning to end."" - Guardian