Katie Drake was an affluent single mother living in Queen's Park - until someone cut her throat and tore out her tongue. Worse still, the killer has abducted her fourteen-year-old daughter, Naomi.

Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster quickly sees chilling parallels with the disappearance of teenager Leonie Stamey three years earlier. With hopes fading of finding Naomi alive, he calls on genealogist Nigel Barnes to piece together the links between the families of the two girls.

The trail leads Nigel back to 1890, when a young couple arrived in the UK. A husband and wife fleeing a terrible crime in their past, and harbouring a secret that's now having bloody repercussions in the present …

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Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster emitted a weary sigh as he crouched over the woman’s corpse, arc lights in the garden bathing them both in bright light, anticipating the first light of dawn. During his convalescence, human nature had not taken a turn for the better. He rose to standing, wincing slightly at the bolt of pain searing up his leg from the metal plate holding his right shin together, then shuddered as he felt a cold cough of wind on the back of his neck. He’d not worn a coat, assuming when he was called and told of a woman’s murder at her house she would be found inside, and not outside on a small, slightly overgrown lawn. The throat had been cut. The body was framed by a wide slick of blood. He looked around the garden. The fences at all three sides were high, giving a degree of privacy, though the upstairs windows of the properties on both sides would have had a partial view. Young professional couples lived either side and got home after dark. Neither of them had seen the body. Still, to Foster it seemed the killer had taken a strange risk.

He returned to the house. The sitting room was neat and ordered, no signs of a struggle. Foster rubbed his face with his right hand. It was his first week back, early November. He’d insisted on being on call. The call had come that Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., four hours after the body had been discovered. He climbed into his old suit, realizing only then that he could fit his thumbs into the gap between his gut and the waistband, forcing him to dig out a belt and pull it to the tightest notch. It had been just over six months since he’d been tortured and beaten and saved only seconds from death. The thought of getting back on the job had kept him going during some long dark nights of the soul. During some nights, when the dreams were at their worst, Karl Hogg’s hot breath still in his nostrils, the excruciating pain as both tibia and fibula snapped under the weight of Hogg’s mallet, he’d thought this moment might never arrive.

But here he was; his first case back.

He had anticipated a gang killing, probably some hapless kid stabbed in the street in Shepherd’s Bush or Kensal Rise. Instead he’d got this – a woman lying dead in a garden, in a lavishly furnished Victorian terrace, on a quiet affluent street in Queen’s Park, a middle-class ghetto between Kensal Green and Kilburn.

Detective Inspector Heather Jenkins walked into the sitting room with a scene of crime photographer at her shoulder. ‘Mind if I . . .’ he said, motioning towards the garden nervously.

‘Fill your boots,’ Foster said.

He turned to Heather. Her hair was scraped and tied back off her face and she looked pale and worn. Bad news, he thought.

‘The victim’s name is Katie Drake,’ she said. ‘Thirtyseven years old. An actress. The neighbours two doors down found her. They had a set of keys. They were alerted by a friend of Katie’s after she and her daughter failed to turn up at an ice-skating rink to celebrate the daughter’s fourteenth birthday.’

Foster felt a shudder of apprehension. ‘And where’s the daughter?’

‘We don’t know. She’s missing.’ ... ...

Dan Waddell’s latest novel featuring genealogical sleuth Nigel Barnes, Blood Atonement, was inspired by his research into the Mormon Church. Here he explains why he finds the world’s fastest growing religion, attracting more than 10 million new members a year worldwide, so fascinating and how it influenced his thrilling new book.

It’s a fact they are given little credit for, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - aka the Mormons - has fuelled the massive surge in interest in genealogy that we have witnessed over the past decade. Without them, it’s arguable that to research our family trees we would have to pack a thermos flask and a round of sandwiches and spend day after day at various records centres rather than browsing on our computers at home in our spare time with a mug of tea at hand.

This is because of the Latter Day Saint belief in baptizing the dead. Put simply, they don’t just want to convert the living to their faith – they also seek to convert the dead. It is the sworn duty of members of the LDS church to trace as many of their ancestors as possible and then convert them by proxy in a ceremony at a Mormon temple. The aim being that the entire family, stretching back as far back in time as possible, will be reunited in the Celestial Kingdom for eternity once the ‘End Days’ have arrived.

To that end, the LDS have sent out thousands of people and spent millions of pounds to track down as many records as possible, producing the nearest thing we’ll get to a catalogue of the dead, all for the benefit of their members and their ancestral quests. From the oral histories passed down through generations on the remote islands of the Pacific, to archives hidden behind the veil of communist China, LDS researchers have taped and photographed millions upon millions of birth, death and marriage records, all of it stored in Utah in a climate-controlled granite mountain vault – literally, a mountain of names.

As soon as I heard this, I was fascinated. Not only by the idea of a catalogue of the dead, mind-boggling though that is, but also the controversy which baptism of the dead trails in its wake. Jewish groups have reacted with fury to the news that Holocaust victims have been converted, not helped by the revelation that an LDS member had baptized Hitler into the faith. The LDS argue that the dead have a choice, that in whichever afterlife they exist they have a choice to turn down the gospel, but the dispute has forced them to back away from Jewish records and ask their members to refrain from proxy baptisms for those who died in the Holocaust. They also continue to tangle with other faiths who aren’t too enamoured by the prospect of their dead being annexed by another religion.

The hazy outline of a plot started to form in my mind. How about, I wondered, if a zealous Mormon wished to convert the living to unite their family in the eyes of the church, only to find the living were not keen to hear the gospel? One way my fictional Latter Day Saint might go about resolving this was to kill them and convert them without complaint. The starting point for Blood Atonement was born.

This interest in baptizing the dead led me to explore Mormon belief and culture in further detail. Like my Detective Grant Foster, and I suppose many others, all I knew about the LDS was that the Osmonds were members and a few stereotypes about unconventional marital practises. Strange, since it’s the fastest growing religion in the world by some distance, and recently Mitt Romney, an LDS member, came close to becoming the Republican nominee for US President, and therefore nearly the most powerful man in the world. I learned two prominent facts: polygamous marriage is a thing of the past, in the mainstream church at least; secondly, that blood and violence was the warp and weft of early Mormon history. Blood Atonement, my book’s eventual title, is an early Mormon doctrine which states that anyone who commits a sin so grievous can only atone by spilling their blood onto the soil. Gary Gilmour, for example, the US killer immortalised by Norman Mailer in his classic The Executioner’s Song, and a Mormon by upbringing, chose to be executed by firing squad rather than the electric chair or lethal injection so his blood would seep on to the ground and atone for his sins.

The Mormon Church has renounced blood atonement, airbrushed much of its past - – ironically given its avowed interest in history – and is now a respectable, civilised almost anodyne modern religion. Yet in the wilds of Utah and beyond, there are breakaway cults and sects who still preach the old fire and brimstone doctrines of polygamy and blood atonement, while baptism of the dead is still very much a mainstream practice.

Armed with all this knowledge, the plot for Blood Atonement fell into place, and another quest for Nigel Barnes, my genealogical hero, was born.