Wire in the Blood

When a child's body is found in a deserted warehouse, Carol calls Tony in to advise, and has to hand the case over to him when a mugging leaves her in hospital. As two more missing children are found dead in different locations, Tony realises that the killer is trying to tell police something about their past.

A husband and wife are brutally murdered in their beds, and a prostitute is discovered dead in the local canal. Worryingly for Tony, the killings bear the same MO as those of a newly-released killer who claims to have been reformed and has now enrolled as a PhD student in Tony's class.

Tony and Carol are both travelling when a bizarre murder brings them home. Further deaths follow but the MOs are all so strange and so significantly varied that profiling suggests each one must be committed by a different person. And to make things more complicated, the killer appears to be schizophrenic.

Hit on the head by a would-be murderer, Tony wakes up in casualty to discover he's got a brain tumour. While Tony faces his own mortality, an anonymous sniper picks off victims in the city streets. Despite every investigative effort, the sniper eludes capture while the deaths seem meaningless and motiveless.