Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene – when ten year-old Jessica Cole was found dead in ‘the Laughterhouse’, an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the S spray painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it?

Fifteen years later there’s a spree killer in Christchurch, and he has a list of people involved with Jessica’s murder case. Somebody is making people pay, and one of them is Doctor Stanton, a man with three young girls.

If Tate is going to help those girls, he has to figure out the connection the spree killer has to the laughterhouse and to the other people showing up dead. And he needs to figure it out fast, because Stanton and his daughters have been kidnapped, and already Stanton is being forced to make an impossible decision – he is being made to decide which one of his daughters is to die first…