At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne thinks she’s seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson’s edge-of-the-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a sixteen-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer could.

Daphne turns for help to the best cop she knows, a man with creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques—Lou Boldt. Boldt isn’t a cop anymore; he’s playing jazz piano in a downtown club and doing his best to forget the past. When Daphne puts her evidence on the table, Boldt is hooked. By all appearances someone is illegally harvesting human organs for transplant. Soon the two cops—and former lovers—are drawn into the dark vortex of a high-tech, highly profitable underground industry—and into the mind of its founder, a doctor gone very, very bad…a man who began by trying to save patients unable to get donor organs through legitimate channels…a healer who let ambition, or something more sinister, turn him into a killer.

The case gets personal when Daphne’s friend and fellow Shelter volunteer Sharon Shaffer is abducted, and evidence left behind indicates she’s about to become the killer’s next organ donor. Daphne and Boldt have only days, hours, minutes to save Sharon from a killer about to make one final, unforgettable contribution to humankind. Meanwhile a woman caught in a nightmare of captivity rattles the bars of a secret makeshift prison, too far from civilization for anyone to hear her scream.

Seattle police detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews return to confront the most challenging case of their careers. People are dying throughout Seattle—victims of a madman who is placing poisoned food in neighborhood supermarkets. But the criminal is intelligent: he writes the police chilling extortion letters—faxed directly from a laptop computer over public telephone lines—and retrieves his ransom electronically, through automatic teller machines in hundreds of locations around the city. And while he is a murderer, his crimes take place miles and often days away from his innocent victims’ demise. How can you stop a criminal when there is no crime scene to study—and no witnesses?

Daphne knows that no killings take place in a vacuum: there must be psychological motivations that she should be able to determine if she digs deep enough. And Boldt knows that despite the seemingly impossible task, there must be some forensic trail that he can follow—even if it is only through the netherworld of computer networks. The two of them work their own ways, with their own agendas, to track a killer—only to find a truth darker than they ever imagined.

Fire is a vicious and greedy killer. It consumes not only its victims, but nearly all evidence of its creator-carried aloft in a column of smoke and ash. Beyond recognition. There is a homicidal arsonist loose in Seattle. Single mothers are being killed in fires that burn hotter than experts have ever seen. The children are spared. Why?

For Seattle Police Sergeant Lou Boldt and the department’s psychologist, Daphne Matthews, the High Temperature Accelerant fires challenge their every resource. The fuel used in these deadly fires is as much a mystery as the identity of the arsonist who sets them.

A Seattle fire marshal reveals to Lou Boldt the ominous quotations sent to him before each of the fires. A twelve-year-old boy, caught in an ugly battle at home, unintentionally witnesses a drug deal that may not involve drugs at all, but ingredients far more volatile and lethal. Did the boy, in fact, see the arsonist’s face? Can police rely on a twelve-year-old boy as a witness? Or is the fire marshal, his past suddenly in question, more involved than he wants to believe?

Who’s that knocking at your door? Do you always look? Do you always know?

The press is calling him the Pied Piper because infants have disappeared from San Diego to Seattle with only a penny flute left in the crib. With all signs pointing to a black market adoption agency, Boldt and Matthews must break the brilliantly conceived network of abductions that has shattered lives and terrorized communities.

With few leads and no witnesses, Boldt and Matthews must battle not only the overwhelming odds, but the involvement of federal law enforcement driven by a news-hungry press and nervous politicians. The more deeply they probe, the more elusive the truth seems—evidence is being stalled, paperwork misplaced, witnesses overlooked. Why, when so much is at stake?

In this gripping new novel, Lou Boldt is back and entering dark new territory. A shipping container washed ashore leads Seattle television news anchor Stevie McNeal and her reporter friend, Melissa, on the trail of a scam involving the importation of illegal aliens. A career stepping-stone for McNeal, the investigation puts her at cross-purposes with the Seattle Police Department’s Lou Boldt and Sergeant John LaMoia. When Melissa disappears, perhaps at the hands of the Chinese Triad, McNeal turns from foe to ally and teams up with the detectives on an investigation that takes them from Seattle’s docklands to the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In this new book, the “Blue Flu” has struck the Seattle Police Force and a majority of the officers are on an unofficial strike. Overworked and understaffed, Detective Lou Boldt is committed to remaining on the job no matter what. But when a string of robberies and the brutal near-murder of a female cop descend on the city, the pressure of being a nearly one-man operation threatens Boldt’s psyche and his marriage. With the help of police psychologist Daphne Matthews and Sergeant John LaMoia, Boldt is able to make slow progress cracking the case, and their work leads them to a Denver convict and his brother, a hardened criminal with a record. As things spin out of control Boldt’s worst fears are confirmed when he refuses to drop the investigation, and it’s clear his life is in danger because of it. Boldt and Daphne come to realize that the robberies, assaults, and strike are somehow all connected.

Friendship comes at a cost. For beautiful Mary-Ann Walker, who struggled with the challenges of a difficult family history, that cost proves to be her life. With Mary-Ann’s past as its only guideline, the Seattle homicide unit must delve into the relationships between a misguided young woman, her family, friends and lover. Let the psychological duels begin.

Seattle Police forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, who volunteers as a teenage runaway counselor, is haunted by the loss of a suicide, a “jumper,” of a year earlier. When a woman’s body is found beneath the Aurora Bridge, Matthews is one of the first at the scene—and begins a puzzling investigation that is entangled with the pasts of Matthews, the victim, and even Seattle itself.

Mary-Ann’s boyfriend has a record of physical abuse, and an attitude that Matthews finds difficult to crack. When the victim’s grieving brother surfaces, throwing blame onto the boyfriend and craving revenge, Matthews gains an unstable ally she does not want.

Then the stalking begins: the eerie phone calls, the noises outside the house, the shadows that move in the night. Someone has their eye on Matthews—but to stop her, kill her, or to help her solve the crime?

While her colleagues, police lieutenant Lou Boldt and sergeant John LaMoia, pursue a hotel room peeper in hopes of solving a series of disappearances, the police and Matthews herself are led into the “Underground”—a perfectly preserved city-under-a-city, hidden beneath present-day Seattle.

Faced with the stalking that is wearing her down and terrifying her, Matthews engages in a mental game of cat-and-mouse, never knowing whom she can trust. She knows that she is caught up in something that could kill her if she can’t solve the homicide. Crisscrossing Seattle, diving below the streets to ancient tunnels, running for her life, Matthews must unlock the psychological secrets behind Mary-Ann’s death, before she herself is buried alongside her. Matthews’ very survival will depend on her skills at the art of deception.