Author: Karen Sander

Monday 28 September, 00.17. The Düsseldorf police receive a strange call: someone has noticed suspicious movements in an abandoned factory in the port area. But when the agents arrive on site, they immediately realise that it is not trivial trafficking: this is a case for Homicide; this is a case for Georg Stadler. Awakened with a start and led to the scene, the commissioner is faced with a disconcerting sight: a pool of blood on the floor, a razor, a shattered mirror, but… no corpse. Just an obscure code drawn on the wall. An indecipherable mystery, except that a few days later, in a hotel room, the body of a woman is found wearing only a pair of briefs, her right hand resting on her chest in an unnatural pose. Her blood everywhere: on the white sheets, on the carpet, on the victim's neck and long hair. Two seemingly unrelated cases, yet Stadler can't free himself from a suspect: both crime scenes seem set up like a macabre film set. The Commissioner just has to resort again to the help of Liz Montario, the brilliant profiler to whom he is bound by a subtle attraction. But this time even Liz will have a hard time, because every progress in the investigation, every new discovery seems to converge on a single suspect: Commissioner Stadler himself.