A Kenzie and Gennaro Novel.
What if a total stranger was watching your every move? What if he read your mail, listened in on your phone calls, knew what you spoke of only to your most trusted confidants? What if he learned your routines? Your weaknesses? What if he discovered those that you love and cling to . . . and then stripped you of them?
When Boston private investigator Patrick Kenzie meets Karen Nichols, she strikes him as an innocent from a protected upbringing, untouched by tragedy. But six months later, Karen commits suicide by leaping from one of Boston's most cherished monuments. What can alter someone so drastically and so quickly that suicide seems her only option? Patrick's idle curiosity soon becomes obsessive when he learns that the tragic events that befell Karen - an "accident" that destroyed her fiance, the loss of her job, her apartment and eventually her mind - may not have been as random as they first appeared.
Through the final weeks of a stifling summer, and with the help of his ex-partner, Angela Gennaro, and his friend, the lethally unbalanced Bubba Rogowski, Patrick enters into psychological warfare with a brilliant sociopath who, instead of merely killing his victims, prefers to make them wish they were dead. Their game of cat-and-mouse brings them face to face with the sordid secrets of an affluent family, a brutal mafioso, a cabal of twisted kidnappers and a perilous encounter in the misty dark of a cranberry bog.
As the stakes grow higher and more personal, they find themselves fighting a losing battle with an enemy the law can't touch, who's always one step ahead, who is gradually learning their weaknesses, their loves, and is determined to tear their world apart.
