FJ Harmon's Mace Franklyn is haunted by the ghosts of a ruined FBI career and a marriage he shattered, and he wants both back before what's left of his life collapses for good. Then the Bureau throws him a single, razor-thin chance at redemption: a high-profile investigation into a string of coed murders tearing through the University of Michigan campus. One mistake will bury him. One breakthrough could save him. But the case deals its first cruel twist when the medical examiner is his ex, the one person who can steady him or destroy him with a glance. As the body count rises, the politically charged investigation blasts his name onto the front page, turning him into a symboland painting a bullseye on his back for the mind orchestrating the killings. With pressure mounting from every side and a hidden political agenda threatening to hijack the search for truth, Mace must catch a killer who is always one step aheador lose everything he's trying to win back.
In FJ Harmon's latest book, it was supposed to be simple: a gala opening, a high-stakes client introduction, then dinner with someone who still made the world feel steady. But before the night could even breathe, bodies started to fall, and the rooms' glittering certainty curdled into panic. Something impossible was unfolding in plain sight. The pattern, the precision, the signatureit all pointed to the Vulcan, a serial killer who should have been nothing more than a long-buried name. Chasing that truth, though, means dragging Mace’s own secrets into the light, and he can’t afford what exposure would cost. Detective Anstice,sharp, relentless, and impossible to ignore,catches the fear he’s trying to hide, and so does his former FBI boss, a man nursing a grudge hot enough to burn down what's left of Mace’s life. Then the killer turns his attention to Mace. And only as he becomes the next mark does Mace finally see what's really happeningand how close he is to being erased.
For some, religion is not faith at all; it is camouflage, a holy mask worn to hide a raw hunger for power. FJ Harmon based this, his first book, on a fictionalized character, Mukhtar Sheik Mohammed, who waswaterboarded eighteen times over five years at Guantanamo,has not forgotten, has not forgiven. He lives for revenge on every hand that broke him, every voice that mocked him, every nation that dared to humble him. Labeled the mastermind of 9/11, he waits as the political winds shift and a faltering prosecutor cracks open the door that should have stayed sealed. Welcomed back into the shadows by his mentor, Mukhtar learns to twist a Zionist's dread of peace into a weapon, stoking fear until it burns hot enough to power his retribution. And in the grip of that obsession stands his nephew, Jacob,born of an Israeli mother and a Muslim father,dragged toward a fate he never asked for, because he holds the key to Mukhtar nuclear plan.
Fj Harmon grew up just above the poverty line in the Detroit suburbs, raised by a single mother and driven early by the need to make something of what he'd been given. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from Lawrence Technological University, then spent the next thirty years in Maryland, Washington, DC, corridor working in Information Systems Technology tied to Naval and Strategic Intelligence. In this world, details matter, and consequences can be measured in lives. When he finally retired to the beach town of Southport, North Carolina, he did what he'd been itching to do for decades: he started writing. That same year, the North Carolina Port Authority announced plans for a deep-water port on Southport’s Cape Fear River at a site wedged between a nuclear power plant and Sunny Point, a strategic arms depot serving the Middle East. The premise was too explosive to ignore. The result was his first novel, Revenge for What Is Sacred. He followed it with Duplicity’s Child and Returning Fire, stories driven by the complex character Mace Franklyn, a man who seems to find trouble wherever he goes.