As dawn breaks over London, the body of a young man is discovered in a windswept Notting Hill churchyard. The killer has left Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his team a grisly, cryptic clue...

However it's not until the clue is handed to Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full message becomes spine-chillingly clear. For it leads Barnes back more than one hundred years - to the victim of a demented Victorian serial killer.

When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes's skills more than ever, because the murderer's clues appear to run along the tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and the present day. If Barnes is right about his blood-history, the killing spree has only just begun...