Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle's Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer-but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape?...

After discovering that a Seattle homeless woman received electroshock treatments, police psychologist Daphne Matthews teams up with her mentor, former police sergeant Lou Boldt, to investigate and uncovers a pattern of murder and mutilation.

Seattle police detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews confront a challenging case. People are dying throughout Seattle--victims of a madman who is placing poisoned food in supermarkets. The criminal is intelligent: he writes the police letters faxed directly from a laptop computer over public telephone lines. How are they to stop a criminal when there is no crime scene to study?

Seattle cop Lou Boldt turns from foe to ally when annoying television news anchor Stevie McNeal, on the trail of a scam involving the importation of illegal aliens, disappears, perhaps at the hands of the Chinese Triad.