A young American woman moves with her husband to Bucharest, and begins to suspect that a stranger who watches her from the apartment building across the street may be a local serial killer decapitating women.

In France, the Porter family is slaughtered while camping in the woods and only Claire Porter survives seriously wounded. She reports that her husband Henry and her son Peter have been eaten alive by a strong man. The eremite Talan Gwynek that lives in the woods with his mother is arrested by the police accused of being the killer. The defense attorney Kate Moore is assigned to defend Talan and she comes to the police station with her investigator Eric Sarin and the animal expert Gavin Flemyng...