Patel and Pardoe

The girl had been staring into her mirror all morning before she picked up the small bottle of sulphuric acid and poured it over her forehead. Samira was a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. What could have brought her to this? DC Jerry Pardoe and DS Jamila Patel of Tooting Police suspect it's suicide. But then a meek husband kills his wife, and the headteacher of the local school throws her pupils out of a window. It's no longer a random outbreak of horrific crimes. It's a deadly virus. And it's spreading.

A young woman is rushed to the hospital with stabbing pains. The chief surgeon performs a C-section and delivers a catastrophically malformed foetus that is somehow alive.... Sewage engineer Gemma is plunged into a ghostly darkness in the tunnel where she works. She escapes, but her boss goes missing in the chaos. He is later found alive...but his legs have been severed and his eyes pulled out.

Det. Sgt. Jamila Patel and Det. Con. Jerry Pardoe have reluctantly acquired a reputation in the Metropolitan Police for their ability to tackle bizarre and apparently supernatural crimes. Now they have been called back together after three bodies are found in a London basement...bodies which have been taken apart, roasted and eaten.

After a South London man is shot and killed at home, his wife swears that the offender had no feet. Even stranger, when a teacher is murdered at a local school, her pupils insist they saw disembodied feet dangling from their classroom ceiling. All across the country, victims claim the assailant was missing a body part, while others stumble upon the severed appendages. It's clear these murders are neither straightforward nor easily explained, which means there are only two people fit to investigate: DS Jamila Patel and DC Jerry Pardoe, who are used to tracking spirits intent on causing mayhem.

A clergyman is murdered in his bed in the dead of night, triggering a chilling chain of events, each more bizarre and unnerving than the last – brutal killings, corpses vanishing, decomposed bodies digging their way out of graves. These shocking events seem unconnected but, at each scene, people report witnessing swarms of flies – hundreds, thousands, even millions of them.