About Book

 

          What if a shrink’s patients are kidnapped and returned alive—but somehow programmed to murder?

          Val Moody left the FBI when the love of his life committed suicide. He quit law-enforcement—and slowly trained to be a therapist. Now he’s starting over. He lives in a pool cabana in chic Santa Monica Canyon, still healing and building a small private practice.

          Then someone starts kidnapping his patients.

          When the first victim is returned, she is shut-down, disoriented, and has her hair parted on the wrong side of her head. Val tries to help her in session but one day she races out of his office and runs into traffic. He fears she wants to kill herself but she crosses the street and kills a pedestrian. When Val reaches her, he realizes she’s in a trance. She runs away before he can do anything and the police think he put her in the trance.

          This same patient walks into a psych hospital ER as a Jane Doe, claiming to not know who she is. In a cubicle, she kills a social worker. The police look at both the murder victims’ work histories and realize they both worked at the same hospital, on the same floor, in the same psyche ward where Moody did his internship. So they handcuff him, take him to the police station and interrogate him.

          When the second victim is returned, Moody’s office is burned down. When a fireman responds, he is murdered. Another patient is kidnapped in an airport. Another is kidnapped. Moody is plunged into a ticking nightmare. Slowly, he unravels a complex set of hints the kidnapper leaves as every patient is returned so traumatized they have to kill. Signs point to the kidnapper being a hypnotist and a Jung freak, taunting Moody with clues.

          But not until Val is himself kidnapped—winding up in a South-Central dungeon, almost hanged in a deserted beach tunnel and finally seeing an exploding police car cause a major fire—does he unearth the shocking secret behind the kidnappings. The perpetrator is one of his own clients, out for revenge.

          Animus rides the lure and presence of LA’s long, dark, and mythical detective tradition down a lonely, mind-bending road with many twists and turns.

          Driving suspense. Breathless romance. A shattering conclusion. This is a book you’ll definitely want to read.