The Butcher

In 1985, Edward Shank, a captain with the Seattle police, became a local hero. He tracked down and killed the Beacon Hill Butcher, a serial killer who raped, strangled and dismembered young women across the Pacific Northwest.

Thirty years on, Edward is eighty and preparing to move into a retirement home. He has handed the family's big Victorian house to his grandson Matt, a rising chef and restaurateur whom he helped raise.

Matt starts renovating the backyard to make the place his own. There he picks the lock on a crate he has never seen before and finds something so gruesome that it will stay with him for life. His grandfather, a hero to the city and a legend in the press, may have been the Butcher all along.

Matt's girlfriend Sam is carrying a secret of her own. She has never accepted the official account of her mother's death, and she suspects it leads back to the Butcher. By her reckoning, he was still killing years after Edward supposedly ended him.

This dark thriller follows two people whose separate searches close in on the same man. It deals in family loyalty and the lengths relatives will go to in order to keep a reputation intact, and it does not look away from the violence at its center.