A corpse that wakes up during the autopsy.

A case of spontaneous human combustion. There is little by the way of violent crime that Capitaine Victor Coste has not encountered in his fifteen years policing France's most notorious suburb ­- but nothing like this. As he struggles to find a link between the cases, he receives a pair of anonymous letters highlighting the fates of two women whose deaths were never explained - two more blurred faces among the ranks of the lost and the damned.

Why were their murders not investigated? Coste is not the only one asking that question. Someone out there believes justice is best served on a cold mortuary slab.