DI Tom Thorne is up against a gruesome adversary who's killed three victims—but his fourth, although alive, has undergone a deliberately induced stroke. With all her senses are intact, she is unable to move or communicate. This is possibly the killer's first miscalculation...or is it? Thorne (given to distrusting his own abilities) is playing cat-and-mouse with a psychopath who's as interested in leading him a merry dance as he is in fulfilling his degraded obsessions.