COPYCAT? OR REVENGE? They have never seen a murder like it. A talented tattoo artist is using poison instead of ink. His victim is a young woman. And on her skin he's left a message: 'the second'. Drafted in to investigate, NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme and his associate Amelia Sachs find the scene has been scrubbed of evidence. All except for one trace - a scrap of paper that connects this case with one they will never forget. And like the Bone Collector before him, Rhyme and Sachs find themselves pitted against a twisted serial killer choosing his victims seemingly at random, a perpetrator who plans his work to the last detail, in a deadly contest with any who try to stop him. But how close is his connection with that old case? What is the meaning of the words tattooed in poison on th

At 9 am on 31st December a man gets onto the packed escalator of a metro station and fires a silenced machine gun through a paper bag. He escapes without being spotted in the confusion caused by dozens of killed and injured people. A note is delivered to the mayor of Washington, D.C., demanding million, or the writer will instruct the gunman to strike again, at 4.00, 8.00 and midnight. The mayor decides to pay up. But then a man is killed in a hit and run accident - his fingerprints match the prints on the note. With the brains behind the operation dead, there’s no way of stopping the gunman killing again, and again, and again... The only thing the FBI have to go on is the note. And Parker Kincaid, forensic document expert, is the only man who can stop the killer.