AUGUST 1940: while Hitler’s bombers are busy reducing London to rubble, biologist George Lawrenson is nearing the climax of Project Genesis – a daring experiment aimed at breeding a super-race to combat Hitler’s armies. But the results of his work are so appalling in their implications that Churchill personally orders Lawrenson silenced and all traces of his experiments destroyed.

          Almost half a century later Jon and Sue Hacket are contemplating the ruins of their marriage. A relationship already under strain now seems to have been destroyed by the savage murder of their baby daughter, Lisa, and the couple retreat to the small town of Hinkston to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

          But Hinkston is a town with a secret. A series of horrific and unexplained murders has brought terror to the area, and when Sue approaches Dr Edward Curtis – a man famous in Hinkston for his treatment of infertile women – to help her conceive another child, past and present evils give birth to a new nightmare…