Alan Beyer

The year is 1672. Hangman Jakob Kuisl and his family travel to Munich, the cosmopolitan heart of Bavaria, for a meeting of the prestigious Council of Twelve, the leaders of the empire’s hangmen’s guild - prestigious for dishonourable hangmen at least. But something dark is happening behind the scenes: in the past weeks, young women have begun turning up dead. At first the authorities assume they are a rash of suicides, but when Kuisl notices that each woman possesses a matching amulet, suspicions arise that someone is murdering them.

My name is Simon. I’m 10 years old. I’m a serial killer. Robert Stern (Rupert Penry-Jones), a successful defense attorney, doesn’t know what lies in store for him when he agrees to meet a new client in a derelict estate on the outskirts of Berlin. Stern is more than surprised, when his old love interest and professional nurse Carina (Emilia Fox) presents him a ten year old boy as his new client. Simon (Jack Boulter), a terminally ill child, who is convinced he has murdered many men in a previous life.

Forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton has spent 25 years solving brutal murders - but none so horrific and merciless as his latest case: A ravaged set of skeletal remains is found scattered in the woods of nearby Cook County. They are all that is left of a victim who had been chained, hand and foot, to a tree on a remote mountainside. The bones tell Brockton and his longtime graduate assistant, Miranda, that the victim was a young male under the age of thirty. As they dig deeper to establish his identity, they uncover warning signs that long-simmering hatred is about to explode.