JOHN RICKARDS

It was a short note. Signed simply 'Sam'. But it was enough to send ex-FBI agent Alex Rourke on a search to an isolated valley in the American mid-West.And now he's trapped there - in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a ferocious storm. With him are a dozen other men and women, all seeking shelter in Isaac's Bar. However the night is about to turn deadly - when the nearby riverbank collapses, and spits out two badly decomposed bodies. The man and the woman were clearly murdered and buried there months before ...As secrets, recriminations and violent agendas come to the fore in the bar that's now cut off from the world, Alex races to find 'the crosses'. And then the deaths begin, one by one by one ...

But the truth about Adam Webb isn't the only secret buried in the Green Mountain woods. Hikers have gone missing, a prostitute has been murdered and something sinister is happening in the ghost-town of North Bleakwater. It soon becomes clear that in the mountains, who you trust can means the difference between life and death. And Alex will have to make decisions with his heart as well as his head.

They have the body of a slaughtered woman. They have a half-naked man standing over her. They have no idea how to make him talk. And so they call in ex-FBI interrogator Alex Rourke to the traumatized Maine town of Winter''s End. But as Rourke probes the mind of the enigmatic ''Nicholas'', he is forced to re-examine his own past . . . Strange things have been happening in Winter''s End. The question is why. And if the man in custody does hold the answers to crimes both present and past, then Alex will have to get to them and quickly. Because it soon becomes clear that what Nicholas has been waiting for from the beginning is Alex Rourke.