Stephen White

Alan Gregory and his family are targeted by Michael McClelland, a murderer who has escaped from the Colorado State Mental Hospital, a situation that is complicated by McClelland's detailed knowledge of Gregory's innermost secrets.

Stephen White's Alan Gregory novels are beloved by both fans and critics. But now, Gregory takes a back seat as his longtime friend Sam Purdy takes center stage. Readers should buckle in for a nonstop ride full of terror and pathos as a number of students - including the sons of both the Secretary of the Army and the newest Supreme Court justice - go missing from the Yale Campus, and attention focuses on the fortress-like tomb of one of Yale's secret...

Forest fires are reducing chunks of the Boulder Valley to tinder and ash; Colorado clinical psychologist Alan Gregory's colleague and close friend, still recovering from a terrible trauma, appears to be approaching a psychological breakdown; and new evidence in an old case causes Alan to reexamine decisions he made in the past, putting his entire career at risk.

At the request of a family, sleuth Alan Gregory reopens an investigation into the murder 10 years earlier of two girls in Colorado, at the time attributed to a drifter. He discovers a connection to a Colorado congressman, a psychologist who was treating the girls.

His plan was simple: pay the shadowy group (Death Angel Inc.) a hefty fee to kill him were he to become a burden to his family. However, after he is diagnosed with an incurable disease, he realizes he has made a terrible mistake. The Faustian plot unfolds by way of conversations between patient and clinical psychologist (Dr. Alan Gregory).