Deputy Leia Temper is back with another twisted and torturous case set in the rural Colorado Rockies.
A man is beaten to death outside his cabin near Salida, Colorado. The scene is brutal but contained—one victim, one weapon, no clear motive.
By the next night, Temper is already following a promising lead. She knows she’s hunting a brutal killer.
The trail leads to the home of Matt Butcher.
But she’s too late.
Now there’s a second body—a woman, also savaged. Butcher is arrested at the scene, but there’s a problem: he’s catatonic, unresponsive, and unable to explain anything.
And there’s another problem: Temper has no idea that Matt Butcher was once someone else—an ex-soldier released from a secretive PTSD facility near Fort Carson. She has stumbled into a covert military program that turns broken soldiers into instruments of assassination. It’s a program that, by its very nature, leaves no loose ends.
What Temper does know is how to solve a murder. Only this case refuses to behave like any she’s seen before. One moment it appears solved, even if the motive is unclear. The next, the obvious suspect—Butcher—is dead.
The truth is still out there, larger than she can grasp, and more dangerous than she can imagine. The closer she gets, the more she puts herself in their sights.
But Temper’s mistake isn’t just missing the bigger picture—it’s suspecting the one man who can bring it to her.
