Confession (Detective Superintendent Mark Pemberton #5)

Detective Superintendent Mark Pemberton is first on the scene when a young man loses control of his bright red sports car and crashes into a ditch. As Pemberton and his fellow passengers reach the wreck of the car the driver is still alive - just. And when the injured man sees that Mark Pemberton is accompanied by a priest he becomes extremely agitated. With his dying breath, the driver confesses to a murder.

Pemberton is baffled. The priest, Father Flynn, is bound by the secrets of the confessional so cannot reveal more, but Pemberton cannot ignore the fact that he has heard a wholly voluntary admission of murder - a freely made statement of the finest kind, a firm admission of guilt. But to which murder was the dead man referring? No suspicious deaths have been reported recently. Among the unsolved cases on the police books are the murders of several prostitutes, the work of the so-called "sandal strangler" who always takes away the shoes of the dead women. Could the car crash victim be a serial killer?

Pemberton and his colleagues find themselves in the strange position of working backwards from the killer to the crime and must use all their investigative powers to get to the strange and chilling truth.