Death duties - Phil Lovesey

A chilling psychological mystery novel from an exciting new talent.

Maldon, Essex, 1969: two policemen and a WPC listen intently as a seven-year-old girl calmly tells them why she's just killed her father.

Thirty years later, the grotesque killing of an old woman, found daubed in cheap make-up, baffles the police, and the discovery of a second body sends the press into a frenzy, demanding answers to the mystery of the Christmas Killer.

The three original officers find themselves on a journey fraught with emotional discoveries and hidden secrets in an attempt to solve the killings, for it is only by unravelling the half-truths and deceptions of the past that a deranged killer's twisted intentions can be halted in the future.