Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, has created a contemporary psychological thriller haunted by the shadowy hands of established power.In rural, impoverished Burgoyne County, New York, a pattern of strange deaths begins to emerge: adolescent boys and girls are found murdered, their corpses left hanging in gruesome, ritualistic fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, yet their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.Meanwhile, in the county's small town of Surrender, Trajan Jones, a psychological profiler (and the world's leading expert on the life and work of one Dr. Laszlo Kreizler), and Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones's family farm. Alone and armed mainly with their wits, protected only by farmhands and Jones' unusual "pet," the outcast pair are secretly cal

"Many dedicated years working for the NYPD didn't mean much when criminal psychologist Trajan Jones was fired from the force. Now living in exile on a dairy farm in upstate New York, Trajan is reduced to teaching an online course in criminal investigation, along with his partner Mike Li, an expert in DNA evidence. But Trajan is called back to duty when a friend in county law enforcement consults him on the suspicious death of several local kids. They're called "throwaways" because their parents have abandoned them, and the official response to their deaths seems equally callous. Trajan and Mike, armed only with their instincts and the help of a precocious neighborhood boy, fight for justice on behalf of the victims, but it soon puts them in a merciless killer's crosshairs"--