Edward Hunter has it all-a beautiful wife and daughter, a great job, a bright future...and a very dark past. Twenty years ago, a serial killer was caught, convicted, and locked away in New Zealand's most hellish of penitentiaries. That man was Edward's father. Edward has struggled his entire life to put the nightmares of his childhood behind him. But a week before Christmas, violence once again makes an unwelcome appearance into his world. Suddenly he's going to need the help of his father, a man he hasn't seen since he was a boy. Is Edward destined to be just like him, to become a man of blood? A true master of the genre that only comes along once in a generation, Cleave unveils a brutally vivid picture of a killer's mind and of a city of fallen angels captured at the ends of the earth.