The Slaughter Man

A wealthy household inside a guarded north London estate is discovered massacred on New Year's Day, and the youngest child has vanished. Detective Max Wolfe finds a clue in the stunning gun used on the victims, a tool once employed to render livestock insensible before slaughter. The trail takes him into a neglected section of the Metropolitan Police's Black Museum, where the file belongs to a murderer who terrorised the capital three decades ago under the name the Slaughter Man. That offender served his sentence long ago and is now elderly and ill. Wolfe must decide whether the old killer could possibly be responsible for the new atrocity.