The Ghosts of Altona

Book excerpt: As head of the Polizei Hamburg's Murder Commission, Jan Fabel is used to dealing with the dead. But when a routine inquiry turns violent and takes him to the brink of his own death, he emerges a changed man. Fast forward two years, and Fabel's first case at the Murder Commission comes back to haunt him. Monika Krone's body is found at last, fifteen years after she went missing. Monika - ethereally beautiful, intelligent, cruel - was the centre of a group of students obsessed with the gothic. Fabel re-opens the case. What happened that night, when Monika left a party and disappeared into thin air? When men involved with Monika start turning up dead, Fabel realizes he is looking for a killer with both a hunger for revenge and a taste for the gothic. What he doesn't know is that someone has been aiding and grooming a deranged escapee as his own, personal tool for revenge. A truly gothic monster to be let loose on the world.