Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. And with an intriguing coda that reverberates with themes of family, myth, and psychic possibility, this new novel leaves us keenly anticipating the next installment of the Novak saga.Īgain proving himself one of today's top thriller writers, Koryta creates edgy suspense not with trickery but with characters who test the limits of their courage.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. But as with his spellbinding 2014 effort, Those Who Wish Me Dead, Koryta employs the desolate Montana setting with such mastery and deep sense of mystery that it's a compelling character itself. Like most of the characters, Larry is a lot more interesting than the flatly affected Novak.

After a female Pinkerton agent Novak is working with is captured and chained to the wall next to Sabrina, the PI turns for help to his Uncle Larry, Violet's shotgun-bearing brother. Pate threatens to kill her unless Jay takes apart selected high-voltage lines-a dangerous task made more frightening by Jay's memory of his brother and fellow lineman getting electrocuted on such a climb.

Arriving in the mountains, where other members of his loopy, boozing, troublemaking family live, Novak encounters Jay Baldwin, a former lineman whose wife, Sabrina, has been abducted by the messianic villain Eli Pate, the cult's leader.

The group, which has a misguided reverence for alternating-current legend Nikola Tesla, includes Novak's long-estranged mother, Violet, a psychic reader who claims she has Native American blood. The suspected killer, Garland Webb, released from a sexual-assault prison sentence on technicalities, has joined a crackpot cult in Montana bent on bringing down the electrical grid-and blaming it on Islamic terrorists. Having escaped certain death in Indiana's scariest caves in Last Words (2015), private investigator Mark Novak returns to his old haunts in Montana in pursuit of the man who murdered his wife in Cassadaga, Florida-a strange town known for its psychics.

The dark rise book