New York is terrorized by a mad killer. The people he chooses as targets for his next blows become victims of an unknown and terrifying kind of Eastern bloody ritual sacrifice. Detective Sergeant Dekker— a policeman, a top specialist in various types of martial arts—finally gets on the trail of the criminal. But at the same time, against his will, he is drawn into a large and dirty intrigue woven from a dense network of murders, deception, betrayal, and stretching through time and space—from the winding streets of wartime Saigon to the diamond markets of Manhattan and the seething “underbelly” of Paris.