Lincoln Rhyme is back again! The excellent criminologist returns along with his partner and paramour Amelia Sachs, inside a blistering bestseller that lab tests forensic detective work in a fearless new world.

When Special Agent Kathryn Dance-a brilliant interrogator and kinesics expert with the California Bureau of Investigation-is delivered to question the convicted killer Daniel “Son of Manson” Pell as a suspect within a newly unearthed criminal offense, she feels both trepidation and electrifying intrigue. Pell is serving a life about The Sleeping Doll: A Novel phrase for the brutal murders of the wealthy Croyton family members in Carmel years earlier-a criminal offense mirroring those perpetrated by Charles Manson in the 1960s. But Pell and his cult associates were sloppy: Not only were they apprehended, they even left behind a survivor-the youngest of the Croyton daughters, who, because she was during intercourse concealed by her playthings that terrible night time, was dubbed the Sleeping Doll.

However the girl never spoke about this night, nor did the crime’s mastermind. Indeed, Pell is definitely both reticent and unrepentant about the crime. And so with the murderer transported through the Capitola superprison to an interrogation area in the Monterey State Courthouse, Dance sees a chance to pry a confession from him for the latest murder-and for more information about the depraved brain of this career legal who considers himself a grasp of control, a dark Svengali, forcing visitors to perform what they usually would never conceive of doing. In an electrifying emotional jousting match, Dance phone calls up all her skills as an interrogator and kinesics-body language-expert to access the reality behind Daniel Pell.

However when Dance’s program runs terribly wrong and Pell escapes, abandoning a path of dead and injured, she finds herself in charge of her first-ever manhunt. But far from merely fleeing, Pell transforms on his pursuers-and other innocents-for reasons Dance and her colleagues can’t discern. As the idyllic Monterey Peninsula is paralyzed by the elusive killer, Dance changes to the past to get the truth in what Daniel Pell is actually up to. She songs down the right now teenage Sleeping Doll to understand what really occurred that evening, and she arranges a reunion of three women who were in his cult during the killings. The lies of days gone by as well as the evasions of today’s boil up under the relentless probing of Kathryn Dance, but will the reality about Daniel Pell emerge in time to stop him from killing again?