At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the
rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne
Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne
thinks she's seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson's
edge-of-the-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a
sixteen-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer
could. Daphne turns for help to the best cop she knows, a man with
creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques--Lou
Boldt. Boldt isn't a cop anymore; he's playing jazz piano in a downtown
club and doing his best to forget the past. When Daphne puts her
evidence on the table, Boldt is hooked. By all appearances someone is
illegally harvesting human organs for transplant. Soon the two cops--and
former lovers--are drawn into the dark vortex of a high-tech, highly
profitable underground industry--and into the mind of its founder, a
doctor gone very, very bad...a man who began by trying to save patients
unable to get donor organs through legitimate channels...a healer who
let ambition, or something more sinister, turn him into a killer. The
case gets personal when Daphne's friend and fellow Shelter volunteer
Sharon Shaffer is abducted, and evidence left behind indicates she's
about to become the killer's next organ donor. Daphne and Boldt have
only days, hours, minutes to save Sharon from a killer about to make one
final, unforgettable contribution to humankind. Meanwhile a woman caught
in a nightmare of captivity rattles the bars of a secret makeshift
prison, too far from civilization for anyone to hear her scream. Written
with a researched realism so convincing that the story could have come
from today's headlines, Ridley Pearson's The Angel Maker will hold the
reader spellbound as it explores the passion to create life, and the
power to destroy it--a novel so shattering, so bizarre, so terrifying
that it raises the specter of a future humanity where the question of
who will live depends on who must die to ensure it.
