About This Book
Seventeen years after drug-resistant ebola, malaria, flu and measles have ravaged the world's populations, the fully clothed body of a young woman is discovered in an abandoned cemetery in a Philadelphia suburb, her beaten off face a writhing, iridescent mass of bluebottle flies, the only clue a religious medal and a handwritten note in her purse that begins Susan, darling. The religious medal leads Peter Starke, Southampton police, and Adrian Fortch, friend, colleague and medical doctor, to Father Ruscz, a parish priest, who believes the murdered woman fits the general description of a former parishioner named Estelle Zabol, and directs him to her mother, who tells Starke the last she heard of her daughter she was working as a dancer somewhere, and gives Starke a photo of her daughter in hopes she is not the victim and that Starke will find her alive and well. Starke is enraptured by the beautiful, red haired young woman in the silver framed portrait, looking over her shoulder, the beginning of a smile, as if she had just seen him and was about so say something, and finding her becomes personal.
