The twenty-third book in the hugely popular Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series from New York Times bestselling author Faye Kellerman It has been almost a year since Greenbury's last murder. Detective Peter Decker has enjoyed the slower pace of his new job with the upstate police department. Then he receives a phone call from his captain. A male body has been found in the local woods. It appears to be a suicide - single shot to the head, gun by his side - but until the coroner makes the final determination, Decker and his partner Tyler McAdams must treat the scene as a suspicious crime. Identifying the body takes Decker and McAdams into the indecipherable upper echelons of mathematics at Kneed Loft College - a sphere of scheming academics, hidden cyphers and most dangerous of all, a realm of underworld crime where even the most conscientious students can become cold and calculating. It will take all of Decker's wits and McAdams's brains to penetrate enigmatic formulas and codes to solve a dark, twisted tale created by depraved masterminds.

"Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn't supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia's husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer. The infamous novel Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley's novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?"--