For him, the question is irrelevant. The taste for murder
has always been present, prowling the edge of his
consciousness like a hungry wolf. In a wooded Minneapolis
park, he performs his profane ceremony. He arranges the
body to his satisfaction. He pours the accelerant,
anointing the dead. Then he lights the match.
"Ashes to ashes."
The newspapers have dubbed him the Cremator. He has
already claimed three lives. And he won't stop there. He
has a plan for greatness. Only this time there is a
witness. A teenage runaway with a dubious identity and a
murky past, Angie DiMarco has seen the face of the killer
in the flickering light of the funeral pyre. Now the
police have Angie, but Angie isn't talking.
Enter Kate Conlan. She knows all too well the dark side
of the human heart. Once an up-and-coming FBI agent, she
left the Bureau under a cloud of scandal. Now, instead of
catching criminals, she helps their victims and protects
witnesses. The job of advocate suits her just fine--until
she's assigned to Angie.
Not even Kate can tell if the troubled youth is a
reluctant witness, a potential victim, or something more
troubling still. Her superiors are interested only in
badgering Angie for a lead, because the Cremator's latest
victim may be the daughter of Peter Bondurant--an
enigmatic billionaire businessman with power to influence
the way the case is handled.
Bondurant pulls strings and gets Special Agent John Quinn
brought to the case. The FBI's ace profiler of serial
killers, Quinn shares a painful past with Kate and hides a
secret that is driving him toward madness. He is a man on
a ragged edge, and yet his insatiable need to do justice
drives him to catch the Cremator--no matter what the cost
to himself.
Amid a frenzy of public hysteria, politics, and media
attention, Kate is confronted with the most difficult role
of her career--and her life. For she is the one woman who
has what it takes to stop the Cremator...and the one woman
he wants next.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy