Alabama police detective Cooper Devereaux chases a cunning serial
killer terrorizing the city of Birmingham in this edge-of-your-seat
thriller for readers of James Lee Burke, Craig Johnson, and Robert
Crais.
A woman disappears on her twenty-first birthday. The following day her
body is found, wrapped neatly like a gift in a crumbling, sun-speckled
graveyard. What does Detective Devereaux have to go on? Very little. No
motive, no suspects. Then another victim is discovered in a crematorium
parking lot. Again, she was killed on her twenty-first birthday. Again,
her body was wrapped like a gift. By the third murder the tabloids have
dubbed the homicidal monster the Birthday Killer--and Devereaux is under
the gun.
While Devereaux's own violent and mysterious past nips at his heels, and
his fragile home life threatens to unravel, he can't afford to be
anything but totally obsessed with the frantic search through the many
layers of this city, from its wealthy enclaves to its dark criminal
underbelly. The only certainty is that Devereaux is hunting a killer
determined to fulfill a deranged agenda in which women's lives are
extinguished like candles on a cake.