Elise grew up in a small town where standing out for any reason was a sin. She hid her intelligence from her over-bearing mother, whose dreams for her daughter consisted of little more than being her caretaker in old age. After nursing her mother through a fatal cancer diagnosis, Elise took what money was left and moved to the City of Columbia. When the cash quickly ran out the kindly owner of the Hell’s Kitchen Diner, Marc Diakakis, offered her a job as a waitress. Her shoestring budget and late hours exposed her regularly to the dark and violent elements that bubbled beneath the city’s surface; and, until the night a serial killer called The Butcher visited the diner, she kept her head down and her eyes forward. But when The Butcher stalks and tries to kill her, Elise remembers the one useful thing her paranoid mother gave her: a small, snub-nosed revolver. She turns, fires, and drops him to the ground. As he lies there dying, she hears a voice in her head; the voice of Scratch. And the years of holding it all back — her intelligence, her fury — come to an end. She shoots the killer in the head and is born again. Galvanized by retribution, she forms a cadre of ‘judge and jury’ vigilantes she calls The Black Dahlias.

Elise grew up in a small town where standing out for any reason was a sin. She hid her intelligence from her over-bearing mother, whose dreams for her daughter consisted of little more than being her caretaker in old age. After nursing her mother through a fatal cancer diagnosis, Elise took what money was left and moved to the City of Columbia. When the cash quickly ran out the kindly owner of the Hell’s Kitchen Diner, Marc Diakakis, offered her a job as a waitress. Her shoestring budget and late hours exposed her regularly to the dark and violent elements that bubbled beneath the city’s surface; and, until the night a serial killer called The Butcher visited the diner, she kept her head down and her eyes forward. But when The Butcher stalks and tries to kill her, Elise remembers the one useful thing her paranoid mother gave her: a small, snub-nosed revolver. She turns, fires, and drops him to the ground. As he lies there dying, she hears a voice in her head; the voice of Scratch. And the years of holding it all back — her intelligence, her fury — come to an end. She shoots the killer in the head and is born again. Galvanized by retribution, she forms a cadre of ‘judge and jury’ vigilantes she calls The Black Dahlias.