New York, NY: Scribner (2005)

Near fine in dust jacket.

Forensic expert Catherine "Cat" Ferry is a thirty-one year old woman at the peak of her professional career when she begins to have panic attacks and blackouts at murder scenes. Suspended from her current case, a string of puzzling murders in New Orleans, she returns to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to regroup. When two bloody footprints are revealed by a spill of her forensic materials on the floor of her childhood bedroom, the sight shocks Cat more than any corpse she has seen in her forensic career. Cat's father was murdered when she was eight, but Cat always believed the murder took place in the garden. The bloody footprints suggest otherwise. Driven by this clue from her past, Cat begins a forensic reconstruction of that crime, even as developments by the New Orleans task force pull her back into the case she left behind. As she pieces together the horrifying childhood events she has been shielded from all her life, both she and the FBI realize the current murders in New Orleans are intimately tied to Cat's family and her past. Finding a solution to those murders means more than stopping a relentless killer; it's the only way to save her sanity and her life.