Like The Penal Colony, this is a thriller set in the near future.

It is twelve years on from a global plague. John Suter believes himself the sole survivor. He has gradually come to terms with his fate and has settled into a steady and self-reliant daily routine.

One morning he finds a mutilated body in the river near his house. In his terror, Suter knows he has no choice but to investigate.

What he discovers upstream stretches his endurance to its limits and forces him to reassess not only his own humanity, but also his place within the human family he had once believed extinct.