His name is Walker Gray. He rebuilds the faces of the slain. The lost, the forgotten, the unnamed. Through his skill and intuition, the missing dead are at last identified, reunited with who they were. Death is his province, but for all he’s seen, he has yet to witness the true scope of it.

In the burial gallery of a hillside monastery in central France, a Cistercian abbot is summoned to a disturbing discovery. In a hidden chamber rests an ancient coffin of bronze. More disturbing is what stands nearby – a bizarre altar, centuries old, constructed entirely of the dead.

In a brick warehouse in Portland, Oregon, Walker Gray and Dr. Jeffery Gray, father and son, renowned specialists in the craniofacial reproduction, have successfully concluded another case. Now, through a mysterious client, a crate containing an ancient bronze coffin has arrived.

Walker Gray’s all-consuming task will be identifying the tangle of bones and black rags inside it. In the process, his days will become a waking nightmare, linked by a hidden well where dozens of headless women have been dumped over the last century, a shadowy organization known as Terminus, their envoy, Adrienne, perfect, poisonous.

As unnerving events escalate, Walker’s psyche slowly unravels, and Dr. Katherine O’Neal, working the graveyard emergency room, strives to keep their love alive and keep him together. And homicide veteran and close associate, Detective Doris Shellhart, trying to sort through events, begins to doubt Walker’s sanity.

For good reason. Those who Walker knows, or loves, will meet violent ends, and the unknown will shape itself into something horrifically recognizable. Walker Gray, on the razor edge of life or death, rebuilder of the dead, must confront the face that emerges from the darkness and into the light.

Linda Gordon