Twelve children disappear mysteriously in a radius of one hundred kilometers: abducted and kidnapped, apparently without a motive.
The children have nothing in common that would hint at a perpetrator. There seems to be nothing that links them at all. One year later the first child corpse turns up, just a few days after the murder. It seems that the child was kept in hiding for months after being abducted. Hopes arise that the other children might still be alive.
A nerve-racking race against the clock ensues. But the special commission is stumped, so chief inspector Richard Claudius is called in, a mysterious and legendary figure in the profiler scene. Hugo Hoffer, or Hugh for short, a young detective chief superintendant at the start of a brilliant career, is placed at his side. Richard Claudius has a hunch and follows it: aren’t the kidnapped children somehow similar?
Akif Pirincci lets his readers despair along with his investigators. The latter find their first clues when Hugh stumbles upon a weblog one evening through a link in a symbolic computer game. He plunges into a world of excessive sexuality, in an archaic myth of reproduction. When the next child corpses turn up, the door to hell on earth has been opened …

Akif Pirinçci

was born in 1959 in Istanbul. At the age of nine he came to Germany. As a fourteen-year-old he made his first movie for Bavarian Broadcasting and soon thereafter received the Radio Drama Prize of Hessian Broadcasting. He later spent four years at the Vienna Film and Television Academy. His big breakthrough was the detective story »Felidae«, told entirely from the perspective of a cat, and which quickly became a bestseller. Rotbuch has published »The Last Armageddon. Crime Stories« (2007).

Rights sold to

: Italy (Barbera Editore)