Six years later the discovery of the skeletal remains of a woman’s body in a storm drain in Brighton leads Roy Grace on an enquiry spanning the globe, and into a desperate race against time to save the life of a woman being hunted down like an animal in the streets and alleys of Brighton.

As Detective Superintendent Roy Grace arrives at the crime scene, he senses a deeper conspiracy than a mere break-in. Grace has his own belief system in ghosts and things that go bump in the night, and he brings that into his cases. Paul Lynch disturbs the reader with the shock of 14 year old Grace’s fate during the Great Famine in 1845, Ireland when the potato harvest was mysteriously destroyed by blight. A long-lost masterpiece sparks deadly violence – and sets Detective Superintendent Roy Grace on the path of a calculating killer.Across the Atlantic, a retired cop waits in a bar in Florida’s Key West for his first date with the lady who is his soulmate. The key, it teaches, is to confess our sins to God because His grace is ALWAYS big enough to make up for any and every wrong we can and will ever do.

La peluria sui volti dei bambini affamati graffia le pagine, il pasto dei folli sull’orlo della fossa comune tinge i fogli di nero e ripugnanza. Bart and Grace travel across the country, to people and places from his past, hoping to find work, to learn there is nothing left of the Ireland he had known. This explanation gives a very helpful insight into the mind of Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a new kind of detective who is going through turmoil in his own life, as well as trying to prevent it from happening in the lives of others. Every ear listening for the sound of coughing, for sickness tramps through the snow and leaves footprints and when it knocks at your door it wants to come in, lean over the fire, take a sup of your soup, lie down on the straw, spread itself out, and bring everybody else into its company. When James’ publisher, Pan Macmillan, came to him to ask him to create a new detective, James says he wanted to make Roy Grace a very separate kind of officer compared to other fictional investigators.

Then he digs just a little too far, and suddenly the fragile stability of his own troubled world is facing destruction . Roy Grace soon realizes that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997. The book ends with Grace, age nineteen, the famine over, pregnant and living with a man she trusts, with hope for the future. And they are fully prepared to take the law into their own hands, and will do anything, absolutely anything, to get it back.