First, a marginal actor is found dead and sawn in half in a car trunk. Months later, a psychiatric worker is discovered in another car, killed and mutilated in a tantalizingly similar way. She had been working with a hulking, subnormal mental patient named Ardis Peake, who was locked up when he was young for the gory annihilation of neighboring twins. This connection is what leads Alex to the first "monster" in this macabre story. And when Peake's incoherent rambling begins to make frightening sense, Alex and Milo are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance, hatred, and manipulation -- and a terrifying encounter with a would-be movie director who traffics in drugs and death. As they weave the strands of this web together, they find themselves involved in a breathless and breathtaking race to save two new potential victims. The climactic discovery they make gives new and terrifying meaning to the idea of sociopathology -- to the concept of how monstrous a real monster can be.