"It was a crime of staggering inhumanity: a seven-year-old girl taken from her home right in front of her desperate working-class mother. With each passing moment, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks realizes that the child's death becomes more and more likely. But there are worse fates than death in a nightmare world of human monsters and their twisted games. And the grisly discovery of a young man slain in a particularly savage fashion only starts the clock ticking faster, drawing Banks into the sordid depths of an evil more terrible and terrifying than anything he has ever encountered."

The books in Robinson's series just keep getting better! (Although the back cover blurbs get more sensational and inaccurate!) Robinson weaves a fine plot, usually with a creative crime--but more importantly, he creates memorable place and characters.