Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
As a menacing snowstorm buffets their van, two men await their prey, a computer genius marked for death. When the young man emerges from a house, Bones loads his special pistol and stalks him. There's a shot to the back of the neck, and the kid collapses and dies. P. I. Max Austin, ex-FBI, takes on the case, soon detecting that it's no simple murder. The coroner says death was by curare. Max knows the "flying death" poison must be injected to work, and yet no syringe or dart was found at the scene. The murdered kid was one of six in Securegard, a company selling security programs to commercial and government groups. Max interviews two of them, but suddenly, two of the others die in mysterious ways. Now Max must learn the causes of those deaths, and find Will before the killers. Needing help with the computer connection, Max enlists Marisol, an ex-girlfriend and head of computer fraud at FBI headquarters. But matters heat up, and soon the killers are after Max, Will, and Marisol. They hole up at a ranch, and only Max's knowledge of nature and animals, as well as his fighting skills and will to survive, keep them all alive. But just when all seems resolved, Max learns there's more to the story. The tangled interactions of computer geeks, killers, and the FBI are far beyond what he imagined, and unless he can cut through the Gordian knot of deception, this will be his last case.< p="">Father of four sons, Mark Bouton lives in Kansas, where he writes novels, lifts weights and practices yoga.