Sarah Sinclair was the perfect victim--she wanted to die. When a darkly enigmatic man approaches her in the small antiquarian book store where she works, Sarah is drawn into a slow dance toward death. A death she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. She is stalked, yet blindly charmed. And when he kills her, seductively, silently, she smiles. Sarah's ex-husband, police officer Robert Sinclair, is the first to find her body and he calls it in to the one officer who will understand: his ex-mistress Detective Lane Frank. As Lane struggles to follow the increasingly elusive trail of clues, another macabre trail emerges--of bodies, coldly, tauntingly abandoned. As the FBI becomes involved, Lane must fight to retain her hold on the case and her grip on Robert Sinclair, whose grief sinks him further into an alcoholic haze of despair and desperation. As a calculating last resort, Lane calls on the one man who can help her stop the killing, a forensic psychiatrist who had stepped too close to the edge, crawled too deeply into the mind of evil. She calls a profiler who has dropped out of society, living simply in a cabin in the woods far away from the madness that called to him, threatened him. Lane calls her father. As they work together, Lane and her father slowly craft an image of a killer so brilliant he has murdered perhaps hundreds and never been caught, so cold that he cannot relinquish his power. With a tortuous trail of names and faces, the killer has insulated himself from those who would repress him and his need to kill, a need rooted in a disturbing, horrifying childhood. And as Lane and her father grow closer to finding the killer, the game becomes personal between two men on opposing sides of evil, men on the edge of an abyss of madness, from which there is only one escape--death.