From the creator of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Cork O'Connor mystery series comes a haunting, atmospheric, conspiracy thriller. When President Clay Dixon's father-in-law—a former vice president—is injured in a farming accident, First Lady Kate Dixon returns to Minnesota to be at his side. Assigned to protect her, Secret Service agent Bo Thorsen soon falls under Kate's spell. He also suspects the accident is part of a trap set for Kate by David Moses, an escaped mental patient who once loved her. What Bo and Moses don't realize is that they're caught in a web of deadly intrigue spun by a seemingly insignificant bureaucratic department within the federal government. Racing to find answers before an assassin's bullet can kill Kate, Bo soon learns that when you lie down with the devil, there's hell to pay. "The Denver Post" [Krueger] pulls the reader in on the first page and holds him fast until the satisfyingly correct wrap-up on the last. Edgar Award-winning author Steve Hamilton When you read a William Kent Krueger book, you're taken back to a place so real it's like home, with characters so close to you they feel like family....[He's] so good I want to kill him. Edgar Award-winning author T. Jefferson Parker Krueger not only tells a cracking good suspense story, but he tells it with deep insight. He understands the eternal battles that draw good people into bad deeds. He understands heartbreak and hope. He understands violence and gentleness. Otto Penzler Krueger writes the kind of novels mystery lovers love to read: well written, both character- and plot-driven, with tense scenes and surprise endings. "Nonstop action...[a] suspenseful, blood-soaked climax." William Kent Krueger is the New York Times bestselling author of The River We Remember , This Tender Land , Ordinary Grace (winner of the Edgar Award for best novel), and the original audio novella The Levee , as well as twenty acclaimed books in the Cork O’Connor mystery series, including Spirit Crossing , Fox Creek , and Lightning Strike . He lives in the Twin Cities with his family. Learn more at WilliamKentKrueger.com. Excerpt Chapter One Nightmare used a combat knife, a Busse Steel Heart E with a seven-and-a-half-inch blade. He made two cuts, a long arc that half-circled his nipple, then another arc beneath the first, smaller but carved with equal care. The effect was a rainbow with only two bands and a single color. When he lifted the blade, he could feel the blood on his chest, black worms crawling down his skin in the dark of his motel room. From the warehouse across the old highway came the long hiss of air brakes and the rattle of heavy suspension as a rig and trailer pulled out onto the potholed asphalt and geared away into the evening. There was an air-conditioning unit under the window, but Nightmare never used it. Even in the worst heat, he preferred to keep the drapes pulled and the windows open in order to track the sounds outside his room. In the dark, he reached to a wooden bowl on the stand beside the bed. He filled his hand with ash from the bowl, and he rubbed the ash into the wounds to raise and set them. It was painful, this ritual, but pain was part of who he was, part of being Nightmare. He performed the ritual in the dark because that was also elemental to his being. He loved the dark, as a man will love anything that has taken him into itself and made him a part of it. It was past time, he knew, but there was no hurry. He put on his sunglasses, then took the remote from beside the bowl on the stand and turned on the television. The set was old, and the signal flowed through a faulty connection. The picture bloomed, vibrated, then settled down. Barbara Walters was on the screen. She sat in a wing chair upholstered in a red floral design. She wore a blue dress, a gold scarf draped over her left shoulder, pinned with a sapphire brooch. From a portrait above the mantel beyond her right shoulder, George Washington seemed to look down on her sternly. The broadcast was live from the Library of the White House. Barbara leaned forward, her face a study of deep concentration as she listened. She nodded, then she spoke, but soundlessly because Nightmare had muted the volume to nothing. Finally she smiled, totally unaware that on the television screen, dead center on her forehead, was a red dot from the laser sight on Nightmare's Beretta. A different camera angle. The eyes of the man whose face now filled the screen were like two copper pennies, solid and dependable. Every hair of his reddish brown mane was under perfect control. He wore a beautifully tailored blue suit, a crisp white shirt, a red tie knotted in a tight Windsor and dimpled in a way that mirrored the dimple in his chin. Daniel Clay Dixon, president of the United States, faced the camera and the nation. When his lips moved, Nightmare could imagine that voice, the soft accent that whispered from the western plains, not so pronou