Why did he leave her alive?They find the girl in the master bedroom, the bodies of the family around her. She's holding a gun to her head. And she will only talk to Smoky Barrett.
Smoky is just starting to pick up the pieces of her own life. She knows what it's like to lose everyone you love. But her tragedy is nothing compared with this case. Because this isn't the first time it's happened. Sixteen-year-old Sarah Kingsley has lost her family before. Not once, but twice.
Someone out there wants her to stare death in the face - again and again . . .
The woman had been missing for almost eight years.
Someone watched her, stalked her, kidnapped her, and held her captive in the dark all that time. No ransom demand, and no suspects. No answers, even now that the woman has been found - thrown from an unmarked car in front of a beachside wedding - alive but unbearably traumatised.
All she can do is scream.
Tracking a kidnapper who appears to have no motive, FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett and her team are plunged into the most sinister and disturbing case of their careers.Then they start to find the others.
FBI agent Smoky Barrett is no stranger to the darker recesses of the human mind. But nothing could have prepared her for the day she had to watch her husband and daughter die at the hands of a serial killer. She bears the scars, mental and physical. Most people would run - from work, from life, from everything associated with the pain of a shattered existence. But Smoky doesn't know how to run - and when the job that has defined her life comes calling once again with the news that her best friend from high school has been brutally murdered, she finds herself back in the firing line, chasing a hidden killer who will stop at nothing to confront her. Face to face.
Imagine a serial killer who has already struck a horrific number of times. A killer who discovers people's secrets -- the deepest, darkest secrets we keep even from ourselves -- and uses them to target and destroy his victims. The case begins with a shock, and the twists keep coming, when FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett and her team investigate a murder brazenly committed on a flight from Texas to Virginia. Who will the next victim be? Everyone in the world has secrets. Even Smoky.