Stepping over the threshold of a once-happy family home turned charnel house, DCI Michael Thackeray knows he'll be faced with a grim sight. After all his years in the force, he's come to realise that you can never truly become inured to the sight of death. Especially when there are children involved. On entering the kitchen he is faced with the unthinkable: the bloodstained bodies of a mother and her young child. Outside the horror continues; a trail of crimson in the white snow leads them to another victim. With the father, Gordon Christie, and his son missing, the police come to the inevitable conclusion that this cruel tragedy is the result of a domestic row turned violent. But are things really that simple? Laura Ackroyd, Thackeray's journalist lover, thinks not, and she soon begins to wonder just who the absent Gordon Christie really is. As things fall apart, Laura and Thackeray become tangled in carefully constructed layers of mystery, and their lives hang in the balance as the full tragedy of the elusive Gordon Christie is eventually uncovered...