American John Luther

John Luther is a Boston police detective and a man struggling with his own personal demons. Both brilliant and emotionally impulsive, he has made his reputation shining a light where others fear to tread, into the hearts and minds of psychopaths and killers, and the shadowy spaces of his own soul.

Luther was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of Neil and Katie Luther. He grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. After Luther graduated from The English High School, he went on to the University of Massachusetts Boston. During his senior year, he began dating a fellow student named Zoe Burman. Luther graduated from UMass Boston summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice. He then applied to join the Boston Police Department. After completing the entire application process and passing the Law Enforcement Aptitude Battery civil service exam, Luther went on to the Boston Police Academy for six months of training. Upon graduating from the Police Academy, he was assigned as a patrol officer to the District C-11 Station on 40 Gibson Street in Dorchester. Soon after, Luther and Zoe were married.

Four years into his career as a police officer, he was promoted to detective. As a district detective, Luther was responsible for general investigations of crime committed within the geographical boundaries of District C-11. A couple of years later, he transferred to the Homicide Unit. As a homicide detective, Luther gained a reputation as being highly proficient in the field of criminal investigative analysis. After five years as a detective, he was assigned to the newly-established Serious and Serial Crime Unit. Reporting directly to the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department, the SSCU is an elite rapid response team with city-wide jurisdiction that uses unconventional psychological profiling techniques to solve investigations of a complex or sensitive nature, such as unusual or repetitive violent crimes.

Luther is an inspired maker of connections and a whirlwind genius. He is also dazzling, obsessive, possessed - and sometimes dangerous in the violence of his fixations. He has paid a heavy price for his obsessive dedication; he suffered a mental breakdown following the traumatic investigation into child serial killer Henry Madsen. On his return to duty, Luther struggles to balance the psychological demands of his work at the same time as trying to save his marriage to his wife, Zoe. His has been under pressure for a long time. Luther has never been able to prevent himself from becoming emotionally involved in his cases and therefore consumed by the darkness of the crimes he deals with and this has pushed his wife away. While Zoe, a human rights lawyer, continues to love him and admire his single-mindedness, she has had to spend all those years of marriage watching him being consumed by his calling, until it has destroyed the spirit of the young man she married. With Luther, the job always comes first and his dedication is a curse and a blessing; an albatross around both their necks.

He serves his own idea of a moral order as much as rules and codes of criminal law. For Luther, his profession is a vocation rather than a job. However as the intensity of his convictions combine with the violence of his passions, they often provoke the question of whether he is a force for good or a man hell bent on self-destruction. As the stakes get ever higher and more personal, his lonely path has threatened to pull him towards the very edge of temptation. Luther's arch-enemy is Alice Morgan, a beautiful multiple-murderess who evaded his grasp on one of his first cases with the SSCU, and with whom he has become locked in a lethal battle of wits.

Tormented by the darker side of humanity, Detective John Luther might just be as dangerous as the depraved criminals he hunts.