The Documentation

A woman is found dead in Death Valley with a photograph in her hand and spirals carved into her chest. She is not the first. FBI Special Agent Sarah Holt has spent years working the cases no one else wants — women found dead in the American West, posed, marked, and forgotten. When a body is discovered on the salt flats, staged with a precision that turns murder into geometry, Sarah recognizes the signature of a killer who has been operating for decades. A young woman named Katherine walks into a university lecture hall and sits down behind the man she has been hunting for three years. She knows his name, his methods, and the family that made him. She knows this because he is her uncle. What she doesn't know is whether the coldness she carries — the clinical distance that makes her so effective — is a tool she built, or something she inherited. The investigation pulls Sarah from a widow's trailer in the desert, where sixty-three names have been kept on index cards for forty years, to a glass tower in Los Angeles where a dying attorney holds iron keys and fifty-six years of secrets, to a compound hidden in the mountains where women are held behind cameras and locked doors. And at the center of it all: a four-year-old girl who speaks in the voices of the dead. Who knows the names of women she has never met. Who draws spirals on every surface she can reach, because stopping means the voices go silent, and silence is what the killers want. Her name is Hope. She is the only witness to fifty years of murder. And someone is coming to take her back. The Documentation is the first book in the Project Spiral trilogy.