Legally Dead

by Edna Buchanan

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Fresh from her triumphant Love Kills, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Buchanan launches a new series featuring former federal agent Michael Venuri, who quits the Witness Protection Program to become a freelance identity-change expert.

Michael Venuri is a former U.S. Marshal and special operative in the Marines whose wife and unborn child die in a fluke accident on the Staten Island Ferry. After learning of two missing children in rural Vermont, the same town where he previously relocated a protected hit man with perverse tendencies and a fondness for little girls, he escapes his guilt by fleeing to Miami. When he meets a NASA employee with a reputation tainted from being blamed for the death of two fellow astronauts, Venturi helps the man fake his death in order to give him a new life with a new identity. Pleased with the idea of using his Witness Protection Program skills to help someone get a fresh start, Venturi becomes a freelance identity-change expert, helping deserving individuals fake their deaths in order to start over. Each death is faked in a different unique, ingenious, and often spectacular manner. Venturi only requires that his clients not contact anyone from their previous life, including him...but soon something evil begins to stalk his clients.

Release date: August 12, 2008

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 368