Macabre

Macabre

Carson Welsh is the most celebrated District Attorney the city of Portland has ever seen. In the summer of 2004, after having wrapped up another successful prosecution, Welsh finds himself in his office sorting through his mail, expecting notes of congratulations and endorsement. What he isn’t expecting is the box filled with human remains that arrives on his desk shortly after trial. Along with the sordid, grotesque parcel, there is a letter attached from a man who identifies himself as Robert Macabre. Macabre seems to have some personal vendetta against Welsh, one that he is determined to settle through violence and sadism against women. Not long after, the other remains of Tracy Dinwoodie are discovered hanging from a tree in Mt. Tabor Park, with a goat mask concealing her face. The press dubs the killer, “Bob the Butcher.” Detective Emily Arroyo is assigned the case, and through a sequence of terse interviews with various peculiar individuals, Arroyo finds her list of suspects growing murkier by the day. Meanwhile, Welsh repeatedly sees a mysterious figure that wears different faces: A rabbit. A bull. A fox. A demon is stalking him in his own backyard, donning animal masks. The days pass and the body count grows, and Welsh must battle the demented fiend as the case hurtles towards a violent and explosive conclusion. In 2019, Emily Arroyo, now a Lieutenant, busts a criminal kingpin named Frank Bruno. Bruno, desperate to avoid jail time, points Arroyo to a gruff private investigator named Anton Baze, who claims to have proof that the city is still home to a latent serial killer. Within weeks, the corpse of a young woman is found hanging in a shipyard, her face covered by the veneer of a pig. The similarities are striking, and Arroyo is forced to warn a retired Carson Welsh about the malevolent force that has risen once more. It has been 15 years, and not a day goes by where Welsh is not consumed with thoughts of the case, but now he must confront his new reality. The creature that ruined his life is back to haunt him. Arroyo, with the help of Baze and several detectives, works to identify a suspect before another mutilated body is discovered, while one pressing question lingers above them like a malignant cloud: How can Robert Macabre be walking and talking and killing again, if they already caught him 15 years before?