Commandant Martin Servaz

The first victim is a horse: its headless body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a secure asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. Commandant Servaz, a Toulouse city cop, can't believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum is found on the corpse... and a few days later the first murder takes place. In this snowbound valley, deep in the Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. It will take all of Servaz's skill to solve it.

They find the boy by the swimming pool, dolls floating on its surface. Inside the house, his teacher lies dead. But he claims to remember nothing... June 2010. In the middle of a World Cup match, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic e-mail indicating that Julian Hirtmann, the most twisted of all serial killers, is back…and hitting a little too close to home. With death and chaos surrounding the small university town in Southern France where he was once a student and where his daughter is now enrolled, Servaz must act quickly. With the help of detectives Irene Ziegler and Esperandieu, Servaz will have to uncover a world of betrayal and depravity to connect the dots between these gruesome murders that keep re-opening wounds from his past.

"You did nothing." Christine Steinmeyer thought the suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve wasn't meant for her. But the man calling in to her radio show seems convinced otherwise. "You let her die..." The note and the call are only the beginning. Bit by bit, her life is progressively turned upside down: someone is trying to destroy her. But who among her friends and family can hate her that much? And why? Commandant Martin Servaz is on leave in a clinic for depressed cops, haunted by the latest crime committed by his nemesis, serial killer Julian Hirtmann. Then he receives a key card to a hotel room - the room where an artist committed suicide a year earlier. He soon realises that the key opens up a most intriguing mystery. Could someone really be cruelly, consciously driving women to kill themselves? Both he and Christine are about to find out...but it may already be too late.