London, 1988 - Alex Spector is an American college student spending his junior year abroad in London to study anthropology, play rugby and try as much English ale as he can. His plans take a dark and bizarre turn as he witnesses a man leaving the scene of a grisly murder of an Indian man in Regents Park. The victim had been robbed, strangled, mutilated and buried. The press bills the murder as a hate crime and the South Asian community is terrified. Legendary homicide detective Ward Atkinson at New Scotland Yard is assigned to the case and under immediate pressure from Police Commissioner Dooley to tie things together quickly and neatly. Few clues emerge and the investigation stalls, but while researching for a term paper, Alex uncovers similarities between the recent murder and ritual killings from pre-colonial India. He and his friends Anil and Bizzie start their own investigations, and when they think they have solved the case, he reaches out to Ward. Alex and Ward join forces, but it quickly becomes clear that their lives are becoming imperiled by unseen forces as seemingly random violence affects them and their close friends. As the fog of darkness, deceit and murder stretches to Oxford, Edinburgh and Belfast, it threatens to envelope them both. Peter Haywood Shaw was born in the Bronx, New York and grew up in Chappaqua, New York north of New York City. He attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania where he majored in anthropology and learned to love rugby football. After graduation he attended medical school at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and embarked on a medical career in pediatrics, where he is rarely the most immature person in the room. He is currently a full-time pediatric hematologist/oncologist living in Tampa, Florida with his wife, three children and dog named ... Rugby.