When a Washington DC Metro Homicide detective started his shift on a sunny July morning, he was greeted with an unusual victim, an obvious snake bite; not something normally considered a homicide, but a tattoo on the victim sends him down a path he would never have believed. As the week progresses, an increasing number of unexplainable homicides draws Detective MacCallen ever deeper into a world of tattooed nightmares, terrors enacted in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Can Detective MacCallen stop the murders before they happen again? "Wonderfully inventive and darkly funny...with a subtle Clive Barker influence... his command of the English language is superb, creating tension and scares from simple and routine situations, the sign of a great writer." -Stuart Keane, Author of Grin and Charlotte