THE NEW BISHOP/SCU NOVEL After years away, Jessie Rayburn has finally returned home—unwelcomed—to a town of menacing whispers: Baron Hollow, North Carolina. It’s as though she never left. That’s why she’s so afraid. She left behind her estranged sister, Emma, who has her own secrets to protect. But Emma is afraid to reveal what’s really troubling her and keeping her awake—strange dreams of women being murdered, brutally, viciously. Now, in this conspiracy of silence, Emma’s bad dreams are becoming more real than ever. Even with the help of Noah Bishop, cofounder of Haven, the group of psychic investigators that Jessie works for, Jessie and Emma fear they won’t be able to outrun the secrets buried in Baron Hollow—or the evil targeting them one last time. Praise for Kay Hooper and her novels “Vibrates with tension, passion, and mystery. Readers will devour it.”—Jayne Ann Krentz “[An] astonishing talent.”— Suspense Magazine “Kay Hooper…provide[s] a welcome chill on a hot summer’s day.”— Orlando Sentinel “Filled with page-turning suspense.”— The Sunday Oklahoman “Readers will be mesmerized.”— Publishers Weekly “Hooper has created another original.”— Times Record News ( Wichita Falls, Texas) “Thought-provoking entertainment.”— Calgary Herald “A full-force, page-turning, suspense-driven read.”— The Mystery Reader “Hooper’s unerring story sense and ability to keep the pages flying can’t be denied.”— Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine “Kay Hooper has given you a darn good ride, and there are far too few of those these days.”— Dayton Daily News “Keep[s] readers enthralled until the last page is turned.”— Booklist “A stirring and evocative thriller.”— Palo Alto Daily News “It passed the 'stay up late to finish it in one night' test.”— The Denver Post Kay Hooper is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Bishop / Special Crimes Unit series, including Blood Ties , Blood Dreams , Blood Sins , and other novels. She lives in North Carolina. Emma Rayburn shot bolt upright in bed, at first conscious of nothing except her heart pounding and the suffocating sense of being unable to breathe. Then she sucked in a gasp and slumped, her gaze darting around the room. Her room. Her bedroom, lit only by the pale light of dawn. Not a dark forest. Not running and pain and terror. Not a soaring end off the edge of a cliff. Emma heard a soft whine, and leaned forward to pet the dog lying on the foot of her bed. “It’s okay, girl,” she murmured. “Just a dream. Just another bad dream.” Her heartbeat was returning to normal, but the oppressive weight of dread she felt had hardly diminished at all. She looked at the clock on her nightstand, saw that her alarm would be going off in another hour anyway, and tossed back the covers to get out of bed. She went to her dressing table across the room and turned on one of the small lamps. With cold hands, she removed a journal from the top drawer and looked through several pages before turning to a fresh page and reaching for a pen to make a simple entry. June 22 Another nightmare, in the woods this time. Different: She was running. Trying to escape. But the same ending. Always the same ending. Another dead girl. Emma stared at the entry for a long time, then slowly looked back through the earlier entries. They went back nearly two years, with casual entries of a day lived in uninteresting habit interspersed with stark dates and brief descriptions noting a nightmare of death. The death of a girl or woman she never recognized, virtually all of them taking place in a dark, featureless room. Not a room she recognized, and yet she was absolutely certain it was somewhere in this area, in or near town. Near home. She didn’t know why she was so sure, but the knowledge was as absolute as the awareness of her own heart beating. In less than two years, she had dreamed about a dozen girls and women dying. Dying violently. Emma didn’t need the first diary entry to tell her when the nightmares had begun. They had begun after what had seemed a simple and fairly common accident. Her family home, now a well–respected and popular inn known as Rayburn House, offered its visitors various means of exploring the Appalachian Mountains surrounding this little valley where the small town of Baron Hollow was situated, and one of those means was guided trail riding on horseback. Emma didn’t ride often; she seldom had the time. But that day she had decided on the spur of the moment to go along with a group from Rayburn House. The trail ride had gone fine, just the same as it always did. Until . . . Afterward, she had never been able to remember what had spooked her horse, but he had shied violently, catching her off guard, and Emma had fallen. Which wouldn’t have done much harm, probably, except that her head had struck a granite boulder. That casual decision to go riding had cost her more than a week in the town’s small hospital, an almost invisible scar above her right