What the pebble knows

<p><strong>The most terrifying thing is not violence without reason it's violence with it.</strong></p><p> When the first body is found Detective Inspector Lara Haggerty sees more than a crime scene she sees a pattern. A woman strangled with clinical precision her glasses cleaned and placed neatly beside her bag. No struggle. No trace. Just silence and symmetry.<br>Then another woman dies. And another. Each scene mirrors the last meticulous deliberate designed. The press call him The Gentle Strangler. Lara knows better. This isn't gentleness. It's control.<br>As she digs deeper the lines between hunter and hunted blur. The killer a mind sharpened by ritual and obsession studies his victims like exhibits in a gallery of order and death. Each act is a composition. Each life a note in his dark symphony. And now he's watching Lara fascinated by the same discipline that drives her.<br>But Lara has her own ghosts. A brother lost to a hit-and-run a case left unresolved and a silence she's spent her life trying to understand. As the investigation tightens she begins to see echoes of herself in the killer's design reflections she cannot ignore.</p>