In Hunter's Point, New York, high-ranking lawyer Peter Lake returns home one evening to find his wife strangled and his daughter's neck broken. On the bed lies a black rose, and a note: 'Gone, But Not Forgotten'. They are not the first victims of the so-called 'Rose Killer', but when Hunter's Point police track down their suspect - and he is shot - they expect them to be the last. When several years later, on the other side of the continent, the sequence of missing women appears to be occurring again, there is a desperate hunt to discover the links between the two. The 'Rose Killer', whose systematic abductions of women reveal no trace of his identity, is back. Or is he? Is someone else involved in the New York case playing the copycat? Who is abducting women again, leaving not a single sign of a struggle - not a hair, not a fibre, not a trace - just a note, a rose...and eventually, a victim.