In the year 2024, middle-aged Pip Durrant has become a successful author on sabbatical at Oxford University, but is still troubled by harrowing visions of the supernatural figure who has dogged him since childhood: the loathsome Piper. He is now on a quest to find the Piper's blasphemous autobiography, the Codex, in the hope that it will help him finally to overcome this ancient evil. But as events lead him and his friends back to the Romanian village of Arva, with its gruesome history of ritual child rape and murder, what new terrors lie in store for them? The Codex is the long-awaited final book in acclaimed author Helen McCabe's chilling Piper trilogy.