'It was the stunned, pale look of bad news' The call was from Rabbi Jonathan Levine, Decker's recently discovered half brother. There has been a murder in Jonathan's family; his brother-in-law, a Hassidic Jew and former drug addict, was found naked in a seedy Manhattan hotel, a single gunshot wound to his head. And his niece, fifteen-year-old Shaynda, is missing... In a desperate bid to track down the missing girl, Decker finds himself in an alien city and a maze of deceit and danger, on a twisted journey that takes him from the darkened slums of New Jersey and the deserted industrial streets of New York, to the hidden meeting places of Hassidic outcasts...
Late one night, Sergeant Pete Decker discovers an abandoned toddler wearing blood-stained pyjamas and covered in bee-stings. Decker and his partner Marge Dunn resolve to find her parents, but nothing prepares them for the gruesome mystery they find themselves stirring up.
Cindy Decker's decision to follow in the footsteps of her police lieutenant father was never an easy one. For Pete Decker is, to say the least, overprotective of his only daughter. So when Cindy begins to wonder if she is being followed - maybe even stalked - her father is the last person she can confide in.
A Californian high-school student is murdered, and the obvious suspect is her fellow student, Chris Whitman. But Sergeant Pete Decker knows that the case has not been exhaustively investigated, even when Whitman confesses to the crime.