Beasts in Velvet

'WHEN YOU arrived,' said the baron, 'did you say anything?'

She thought back beyond the blackness of her fainting spell. She remembered opening the coach door, and setting her foot on the cobbles. Then there were flashes of red in the dark. She heard the ghost of a scream, and received the image of someone in a long, voluminous garment, bent over a shrieking animal, working away inside it. No, it was not an animal. It was - had been - a woman.

THE DARK, CROWDED streets of Altdorf, greatest city of the Old World, have always teemed with rogues and cut-throats. But now the City Watch is faced with its greatest challenge, a murderer so savage that he is known only as the Beast. Against a background of mounting fear and hysteria, three unlikely allies must work together to track down the killer. A trail of bloody clues leads to the Imperial court - can the Beast be apprehended before the Empire is overwhelmed by the flames of revolution?