Detective Donovan Burke has seen his share of corpses, but when he is called to a crime scene where the body of a young woman is propped against the gnarled trunk of a tree at the river's edge, the hard shell and aloof demeanor he's spent years trying to develop begins to crumble. Clutched in the victim's small, lifeless hand is a plastic bag containing clumps of her own, dark brown hair, and scrawled in blood-red paint on her shaved head is the word Sinner. The police begin the investigation treating it as an isolated case, but within a week another young woman falls prey to the sadistic killer the media refers to as "The Barber"-and he is just getting started. Struggling to find a key that links the victims, Burke, and his partner Hank Slimbaugh, find themselves drawn into a race that began at the river's edge but will end at their own front door.