He was supposed to be gone forever. Now he’s back.

Ten years ago, DCI Oldroyd was the only person who could see the monster hiding behind Adam Blake’s charm. Oldroyd proved that Blake was a deadly serial killer, responsible for murdering many innocent people. Having vowed to take revenge on Oldroyd, on a crisp autumn morning Blake escapes from jail…

Hours later, in the Yorkshire market town of Otley, a man is found strangled inside the old courthouse. Written in bold black ink across the victim’s forehead is a single chilling word: vindicta—revenge. Oldroyd’s blood runs cold when he picks up a call and hears an all-too-familiar voice: I’m coming for you.

Oldroyd has spent years getting inside the minds of dangerous murderers to protect lives. But with a determined killer closing in, can he catch Blake once more and solve this difficult case, or will Oldroyd be the next to die?

John R. Ellis has lived in Yorkshire for most of his life and has spent many years exploring Yorkshire’s diverse landscapes, history, language and communities. He recently retired after a career in teaching, mostly in further education in the Leeds area. In addition to the Yorkshire Murder Mystery series, he writes poetry, ghost stories and biography. He has completed a screenplay about the last years of the poet Edward Thomas and a work of faction about the extraordinary life of his Irish mother-in-law. He is currently working (slowly!) on his memoirs of growing up in a working-class area of Huddersfield in the 1950s and 1960s.