Some killers are born. Some are made. For him, the question is irrelevant. The taste for murder has always been present, prowling the edge of his consciousness like a hungry wolf. In a wooded Minneapolis park, he performs his profane ceremony. He arranges the body to his satisfaction. He pours the accelerant, anointing the dead. Then he lights the match. "Ashes to ashes." The newspapers have dubbed him the Cremator. He has already claimed three lives. And he won't stop there. He has a plan for greatness. Only this time there is a witness: a teenage runaway with a dubious identity and a murky past, Angie DiMarco has seen the face of the killer in the flickering light of the funeral pyre. Now the police have Angie, but Angie isn't talking. Kate Conlan knows all too well the dark side of the human heart. Once an up-and-coming FBI agent, she left the Bureau under a cloud of scandal. Now, instead of catching criminals, she helps their victims and protects witnesses. Her superiors are interested only in badgering Angie for a lead, because the Cremator's latest victim may be the daughter of Peter Bondurant an enigmatic billionaire businessman with power to influence the way the case is handled. Bondurant pulls strings and gets Special Agent John Quinn brought to the case. The FBI's ace profiler of serial killers, Quinn shares a painful past with Kate and hides a secret that is driving him toward madness. He is a man on a ragged edge, and yet his insatiable need to do justice drives him to catch the Cremator no matter what the cost to himself. Amid a frenzy of public hysteria, politics, and media attention, Kate is confronted with the most difficult role of her career and her life. For she is the one woman who has what it takes to stop the Cremator, and the one woman he wants next.