Douglas V Dollard

Harper Riggs Douglas V Dollard

FBI SPECIAL AGENT HARPER RIGGS IS ONE OF THE FEW AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN TO MAKE A SUCCESSFUL CAREER IN THE FBI. Of the FBI's thirty-five thousand active agents, Harper Riggs is one of only a handful of African American women to gain entry to the nearly all white, mostly male fraternity of special agents. After graduating from the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia she is assigned to the FBI's field office in Washington, D. C., a reward for graduating third in a class of two hundred fifty new agent trainees. Harper's first important case brings her into the confidence of a legendary veteran agent her colleagues call the lioness of special projects, Elizabeth Allard. But when Lizzie asks her to become a ghost, an agent working clandestinely within the Agency to expose a mole, Harper has grave concerns. Choosing incorrectly could easily end her career. Harper has always considered herself inviolable, but fortune is often fickle, as she is soon to discover. One day, quite by accident, Harper stumbles across a mysterious file on the cellphone of a Department of Defense scientist who has recently vanished while on a camping trip in Arizona's Superstition Mountains. The file's contents prove to be candid photographs of twenty-seven women; all victims of the serial killer the media has dubbed Doctor Sleep. For more than twenty years Doctor Sleep has been abducting young, attractive women, immobilizing them and surgically removing their faces before fitting them with grotesque paper mache masks, hideous caricatures of their former beauty. But tracking the cellphone's owner proves more difficult than Harper could ever imagine. Her most promising lead is the missing scientist's childhood friend, who is currently serving a life sentence for murder in the Federal Government's Supermax prison facility in Florence, Colorado. A meeting with the prisoner only serves to deepen the mystery. Is the missing scientist the infamous Doctor Sleep, or just a pawn Sleep has sacrificed to obscure his identity? Thwarted at every turn, Harper begins to suspect someone is observing her every move, enticing her with clues that lead nowhere. Discovering the truth will lead her down a path that could not only end her career, but also her life.