Catherine "Cat" Ferry is a forensic odontologist, a specialist in bite marks and the clues they provide. But while Cat's colleagues know her as a world-class scientist, she secretly attempts to manage her fragile psyche with alcohol, delving into the minds of rapists and murderers yet never allowing her own frightening past to creep into the foreground.
Cat's latest case involves a disturbing murder in New Orleans. Banishing her personal demons, she focuses on the potential killer, until one morning she's paralyzed by a panic attack at a grisly murder scene. When another victim dies in the same shocking way - raising fears that a serial killer is at large - Cat blacks out over the victim's mutilated corpse.
Suspended from the FBI task force, plagued by nightmares, and at odds with her married lover - a homicide detective - Cat retreats to her family's secluded antebellum estate. When some of her forensic chemicals are spilled in her childhood bedroom, two bloody footprints are revealed. This sight shocks her more than any corpse she has seen in her career. Cat's father was murdered when she was eight years old, but she always believed the crime occurred in the garden outside their home.
Driven by this fragment of her past, Cat attempts a forensic reconstruction of the decades-old crime. Soon both she and the FBI realize that the murders occurring now in New Orleans are intimately bound up with Cat's family and her past.
Greg Iles is a masterful storyteller. In this dramatic novel of suspense he deftly probes the relationship between good and evil, and the unique power of human memory to reconstruct - or completely reinvent - the past.