Theodore Tate

A standard exhumation becomes anything but for private investigator Theodore Tate when bodies begin bubbling to the surface of the cemetery lake. Tate knows he has to let it go. But when the coffin is opened and its occupant is not the old man supposed to be inside, he knows he cannot walk away. But he cannot let the police keep digging, because they are getting dangerously close to digging up the real truth: the truth about him.

People are disappearing. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn't make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn't make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he's asked by Green's father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them knows is that a former mental patient is holding people prisoner as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs. Now he has acquired the ultimate collector's item—an actual killer.

Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene—ten-year-old Jessica found dead in the Laughterhouse, an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the S painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it? Fifteen years later, a new killer arrives in Christchurch, and he has a list of people who were involved in Jessica's murder case, one of whom is the unfortunate Dr. Stanton, a man with three young girls. If Tate is going to help them, he has to find the connection between the killer, the Laughterhouse, and the city's suddenly growing murder rate.

When the body of a convicted rapist is found, obliterated by an oncoming train, Tate works the case, trying to determine if this is murder or suicide. The following night, two more rapists go missing. It's hard to investigate when everyone on the police force seems to be rooting for the killer. There's a common plea detectives get from the loved ones of victims: When you find the man who did this, give me five minutes alone with him. And that's exactly what someone is doing.